Most tilers can tell you exactly what a bag of adhesive costs. Far fewer can tell you what a missed call, a slow quote or a forgotten follow-up actually costs the business over a year. It's rarely one big mistake — it's a handful of small leaks that never show up as a single line on a bank statement.
1. Missed calls that never become jobs
You're up a ladder or on your knees grouting, the phone rings, and it goes to voicemail. Plenty of people won't leave a message; they'll just try the next tiler on the list. A missed call from a genuine enquiry can easily be a job that quietly went to someone else, so it's worth calling back the same day, even if it's from the van at lunchtime.
2. Quotes that go out too slowly
A customer getting three quotes usually books with whoever gets back to them first with a clear, professional price — not necessarily the cheapest. If your quote takes three days because it means sitting down in the evening to work out materials and write it up, you're losing winnable jobs to speed, not price.
With TileIQ's quoting software, the material calculation is already done from your room measurements, so a professional quote can go out from the van, the same day as the site visit.
3. Underpricing the job itself
Pricing from memory or a rough mental average tends to drift in one direction: down. Awkward cuts, extra waste on a pattern lay, or a room with more prep than expected all get absorbed rather than costed in, because there's no system forcing you to price each element properly.
Running the numbers through a proper estimating tool every time — materials, labour and waste — takes the guesswork, and the underpricing, out of it.
4. Invoices that go out late, and get chased even later
Cash tied up in finished jobs is money you've already spent your time and materials earning. An invoice that goes out a week after the job, with no reminder if it goes unpaid, quietly stretches out how long you're waiting to get paid — and how much admin time it costs you to chase it.
Invoicing straight from the finished job in TileIQ means the invoice reflects exactly what was quoted and completed, and can go out the same day the job finishes instead of waiting for a free evening.
Example: what does your admin time actually cost?
You can put a number on it with a simple sum. Use your own figures — the ones below are only placeholders to show the method.
- Work out your hourly value: your day rate ÷ the hours in your working day. For example, a £200 day over 8 hours = £25 an hour. Not sure what your day rate should be? Try the tiler day rate calculator.
- Count the unpaid admin hours: quoting, chasing and invoicing in the evenings. Say 4 hours a week.
- Multiply it out: 4 hours × £25 = £100 a week. Over 46 working weeks, that's £4,600 a year of your time that never appears on an invoice.
Cutting that in half doesn't need more hours — it needs fewer steps. For pricing each job properly, see how to calculate profit on a tiling job.
None of these are big, dramatic losses. They're small delays and small gaps, repeated every week — which is exactly why they're so easy to miss and so worth fixing.
5. Jobs and customers scattered across too many places
A notebook for jobs, texts for customer messages, a mental note of who still owes an invoice — the more places a job's information lives, the easier it is for something to fall through. A missed follow-up or a forgotten invoice isn't usually a big mistake; it's just a detail that lived in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Keeping enquiries, quotes, jobs and invoices in one place is the point of a proper job management system — nothing depends on you remembering it.
The fix isn't more hours — it's fewer gaps
None of this is about working harder. It's about making sure every enquiry gets a reply, every quote goes out fast, every job is priced properly, and every invoice actually gets sent. TileIQ is built to close those gaps, so the money you've already earned doesn't leak away.
