Canada · HVAC & Building Services
Sasquatch Heat Pumps
“The business was growing. The admin was growing faster.”
Manual job scheduling, quoting, and customer communication processes consuming field and office capacity replaced by automated Power Platform workflows - cutting administrative overhead by 60%.
Key Results
−60%
Admin overhead
Office time per week
5 min
Quote generation
Was 30–45 minutes
Automated
Customer comms
All 4 touchpoints
Mobile
Field access
Live job data on every technician's phone
Tech Stack
The Situation
Sasquatch Heat Pumps is a residential HVAC services company in North America - a business that wins on quality, speed of response, and the professionalism of its field technicians. The problem was that behind the customer-facing excellence, the back-office operation was running on a combination of phone calls, a whiteboard, and a shared calendar that field teams couldn't reliably access on-site. As job volume grew, the cracks became visible. Quotes took 30–45 minutes of back-office time each and still came back with pricing errors because the rate card was a spreadsheet nobody could keep current. Appointment reminders went out late - or not at all. Field technicians called the office at the start of every job to get information that should have been on their phone. The office team was working harder and harder to keep up with a volume of admin that was scaling linearly with job count - an unsustainable trajectory.
For residential services businesses growing rapidly, this operational ceiling is very common:
- ✓
Your scheduling is managed via a whiteboard, a shared calendar, or someone's personal knowledge - and it breaks when they're unavailable
- ✓
Quote generation is a manual process that takes 30+ minutes and still produces inconsistent pricing
- ✓
Field technicians call the office to get job information that should already be on their phone
- ✓
Customer communications - confirmations, reminders, follow-ups - depend on office staff remembering to send them
- ✓
You know you need to automate "eventually" - but right now the volume of work is too high to stop and fix the process
- ✓
Admin overhead is growing proportionally with job volume - there's no leverage in the current setup
If three or more of these describe your operation, you're looking at the right case study.
The Root Problem
- 1
Job scheduling was managed manually - whiteboard and shared calendar - with no mobile access for field technicians
- 2
Quote generation took 30–45 minutes per quote with frequent pricing errors from an out-of-date spreadsheet rate card
- 3
Customer communication - booking confirmations, appointment reminders, job completion summaries - was done manually with inconsistent follow-through
- 4
Field technicians had zero on-site access to job details, customer history, or site notes - they called the office before every job
- 5
Admin overhead was scaling linearly with job volume - the business could not grow without adding headcount to handle administration
How We Fixed It
Build a Power Apps field operations app for technicians
The first deliverable was a mobile Power App giving field technicians access to their daily schedule, job details, customer notes, site history, and prior visit records - directly from their phone. They can update job status, capture photos, log materials used, and submit job completion notes from on-site. The pre-job office call was eliminated on day one of go-live.
Automate quote generation
Built a Power Apps quoting tool that generates formatted proposals from a structured, maintained product and pricing database - shared across the team and updated in one place. The quoting process became a 5-minute guided workflow producing a professional PDF with consistent, current pricing. Pricing errors dropped to near-zero.
Automate customer communications at every job stage
Four Power Automate flows replaced the manual customer communication process: booking confirmation (triggered immediately on booking), appointment reminder (24 hours before), technician en-route notification (triggered when technician marks en-route in the app), and job completion summary with invoice link (triggered on job completion). All four fire automatically - office staff no longer need to initiate any of them.
Operations dashboard for business owner visibility
Delivered a Power BI dashboard giving the business owner real-time visibility into job pipeline by technician, quote conversion rate, revenue by service type and period, and customer satisfaction scores. For the first time, the business could see its own operational performance at a glance - without asking the office team to assemble a report.
Measured Outcomes
Admin overhead
Scaling linearly with job volume
−60% reduction per week
↑ Key win
Quote generation time
30–45 minutes, frequent errors
5 minutes, consistent pricing
↑ Key win
Customer communications
Manual - inconsistent follow-through
Automated at all 4 job stages
Field technician access
None on-site - called office before every job
Full mobile access via Power Apps
Business visibility
Owner asks office team for any number
Real-time Power BI dashboard
What This Means For You
What this means for residential services businesses hitting a growth ceiling
The admin ceiling is one of the most predictable growth blockers in residential services businesses. It appears when job volume outgrows the manual processes that were built for a smaller operation - and the only apparent fix is hiring more office staff. But the actual fix is automating the processes that are consuming the office team's capacity. Power Platform - Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI - is designed exactly for this: operational automation for businesses that don't have dedicated development teams. If your quote generation, customer communication, and field scheduling are still largely manual, the cost of not automating is the headcount you'll need to hire to keep up with growth.
Next Step
Is this your situation?
Book a 30-minute call. No slides, no pitch. We'll look at your specific setup, tell you what's causing the problem, and what a realistic fix looks like - including timeline and cost range.