# One Operating Backbone From Quote to Invoice for a Fire Protection Contractor

> Sales, jobs, site documents, technician time and invoicing lived in five systems that did not talk. We connected them through Salesforce so every job runs on one record from the first quote to the paid invoice.

- Source: https://synconai.com/case-studies/fire-protection-quote-to-invoice-on-salesforce
- Publisher: SynconAI (https://synconai.com)
- Type: Case study
- Evidence: Delivered client engagement. The client is anonymised; the industry, products and outcomes are theirs.
- Organisation: A passive fire protection and construction services contractor in Australia, running sales, site crews, subcontractors and compliance documentation across multiple projects at once
- Industry: Commercial & Business Services
- Products: Sales Cloud, Field Service, Salesforce Platform, Apex REST, Lightning Web Components, Xero, QuickBooks Time, Dashpivot
- Service: Salesforce Field Service (https://synconai.com/salesforce-field-service)
- Reading time: 6 minutes

## In short

We connected a fire protection contractor’s sales, field jobs, site documents, technician hours and invoicing through Salesforce. Sales Cloud runs quotes and jobs, work orders drive scheduling, and custom Apex REST integrations keep QuickBooks Time, Dashpivot and Xero in step, so each job runs on one record from quote to paid invoice.

## Key points

- For a contractor, the job is the unit of truth. Every system should read from it and write back to it, or the business ends up reconciling five versions of the same job.
- Custom Apex REST was the right call here. The volumes were moderate and the logic was specific, so a middleware layer would have added cost without adding control.
- Automate the work orders people create the same way every time. Child work orders built from the parent removed a whole class of missed tasks.
- Write links back. A Dashpivot folder nobody can find from Salesforce is a document the office will ask the crew for again.

## Quote to paid invoice on one record

A job starts as a quote on a Sales Cloud opportunity with the contractor’s standard terms attached. Once won, it becomes a job with purchase orders and parent and child work orders. Scheduling pushes appointments to QuickBooks Time, where technicians clock their hours, and the hours flow back to the work order. Dashpivot holds the site folder, forms and compliance documents, pre-filled from Salesforce, with the links written back to the job. When the work is complete, Salesforce raises the invoice in Xero and attaches the invoice file to the record, so finance, operations and sales all read the same job.

### 1. Sell

- Lead
- Opportunity
- Quote with terms
- Account and contacts

Quote terms are standard, so every proposal carries the same conditions and every variation starts from them.

### 2. Plan the job

- Job record
- Purchase orders
- Parent work order
- Child work orders

Child work orders are created by automation from the parent, not typed by hand.

### 3. Schedule and clock

- Service appointments
- QuickBooks Time
- Two-way sync
- Timesheets

Appointments go out and hours come back on the same work order.

### 4. Document the site

- Dashpivot site folder
- Pre-filled forms
- Document links
- Compliance records

The site folder is created from Salesforce and linked back to the job.

### 5. Invoice

- Xero invoice
- Invoice file on the record
- Job closed

Finance works from the same job the crew completed.

## The starting position

The contractor installs and certifies passive fire protection on commercial construction projects. Its work is high in compliance and low in tolerance for error: every penetration sealed, every product used and every inspection has to be evidenced, because a building cannot be signed off without it.

Before this engagement, that work ran across five tools. Sales lived in Salesforce, but only as a list of opportunities. Jobs were tracked in spreadsheets. Technicians clocked hours in QuickBooks Time. Site forms, photos and compliance records sat in Dashpivot. Invoices were raised in Xero. None of them shared a job number anyone trusted, so the office spent its week copying details from one system to the next, and every copy was a chance to get a site address, a scope line or a billable hour wrong.

The cost showed up in three places. Quotes went out with inconsistent terms. Jobs started without a complete set of work orders, so tasks were discovered on site. And invoicing waited on someone matching timesheets and site records by hand, which slowed cash collection on every project.

The business was also growing. More projects meant more crews, more subcontractors and more documents per week, and the manual hand-offs that were tolerable at a smaller size were becoming the limit on how much work the office could take on.

The brief was clear: one operating backbone for sales, field jobs, documentation, time and accounting, without forcing crews off the tools that work in the field.

## What we built

### 01 Sales Cloud as the commercial front end

We rebuilt the sales process on Sales Cloud for the way the contractor actually wins work: leads from builders and head contractors, opportunities by project, and quotes that carry the company's standard terms. Quote terms were added as a delivered enhancement, so every proposal now goes out with the same conditions, which matters when a variation or a dispute arrives months later.

### 02 Jobs, purchase orders and work orders

A won opportunity becomes a job. We modelled purchase orders against the job, and parent and child work orders underneath it, with custom automation creating the child work orders from the parent. A typical project has the same set of tasks every time, so the system now creates them instead of relying on someone to remember them.

### 03 Scheduling synced two-way with QuickBooks Time

Appointments are scheduled in Salesforce and pushed to QuickBooks Time, where technicians already clock on and off. We deployed the production scheduler and built a two-way integration, so hours worked return to the right work order without anyone keying them in. The office sees planned against actual on the job record.

### 04 Dashpivot site folders and pre-filled forms

Dashpivot was delivered in two phases. Phase 1 creates the site and work order folders from Salesforce and writes the document links back to the job. Phase 2 added document workflows and pre-fill, so forms open on site with the job details already in place. Crews spend their time on the work, and the compliance record is complete when they leave.

### 05 Xero invoicing with the file on the record

When a job is ready to bill, Salesforce raises the invoice in Xero and attaches the invoice file back to the record. Finance, operations and sales now look at the same job and the same invoice, and nobody has to search a mailbox to answer a builder's billing question.

### 06 Operational alerts

We also scoped the Slack requirements for operational workflows, so the right people hear about job events without watching a report.

## How we delivered it, end to end

**One project, traced end to end.** The design started from the path a real job takes, from quote to invoice, and every hand-off between systems on that path became an item on the integration backlog.

**Data model before integrations.** Job, purchase order, work order and appointment were settled first, because every integration reads from or writes to them. With that model agreed, each integration had a clear owner record and a clear direction of travel.

**Integrations in custom Apex REST.** The rules were specific to this business, such as which hours belong to which work order and which forms are pre-filled for which job, so the logic sits inside Salesforce, next to the records it governs, and is tested with the rest of the org.

**Delivered in phases.** Sales Cloud and the job model came first, then the QuickBooks Time scheduler went into production, then Dashpivot in two phases, then Xero. Each phase stood on its own, so the business was using the new process while the next piece was built.

**Support and enhancements after go-live.** The contractor stays on ongoing support. Quote terms, Dashpivot pre-fill and child work order automation were delivered as later enhancements through that relationship.

## The decisions that mattered

**Keeping the field tools.** It would have been tidier on a whiteboard to move everything into Salesforce. In practice, technicians already used QuickBooks Time and Dashpivot well. We made Salesforce the system of record and let the field tools stay the system of entry, which is why adoption was not a fight.

**Custom code over middleware.** A middleware platform would have added licence cost and another place to debug. For this volume and this rule set, well-tested Apex REST was the cheaper and more transparent option, and it can move to middleware later if volumes grow.

**Automating the boring, repeatable parts first.** Child work orders and form pre-fill are not glamorous. They removed the most frequent errors, and that earned the trust needed for the bigger integrations.

## Beyond the CRM: a technical library for estimators

The relationship grew past Salesforce. Alongside the CRM work, we built a separate web application for the contractor, a fire protection estimator and technical library on Next.js. Estimators and technicians look up approved systems and products, filter by manufacturer, and produce PDFs to support a quote or an inspection.

The application has authenticated access for three roles, users, technicians and administrators, with subscription pages for external users. It sits outside Salesforce on purpose: the library is a product in its own right, used by people who will never hold a Salesforce licence, and it needed a public-facing experience a CRM page cannot give.

AI identification of fire stopping products and MCP-based workflows are in development on top of the library. They are not live yet, and we describe them here only to show where the platform is heading: the same discipline of one source of truth, now applied to the technical knowledge behind every quote.

## What changed

| Area | Before | After |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Quotes | Terms varied by who wrote the proposal | Standard terms on every quote from Sales Cloud |
| Job setup | Tasks discovered on site | Parent and child work orders created by automation |
| Technician hours | Re-keyed from timesheets | Synced two-way from QuickBooks Time to the work order |
| Site documents | Searched for in Dashpivot | Folder created from the job, links on the record, forms pre-filled |
| Invoicing | Waited on manual matching | Raised in Xero from the job, invoice file attached |
| Visibility | Five systems, five versions of a job | One job record that every team reads |

The point of the design is simple: with one record per job, the office stops reconciling systems and starts managing the work.

## What we would tell a contractor starting this

Most contractors we speak to already own the right tools. What they lack is a single place where a job is defined, so each tool holds a slightly different version of it.

Start with the job. Agree what a job is, what belongs under it and which system owns each piece of it, before anyone builds an integration. Keep the tools your crews already use well, and make them read from and write back to the job. Then automate the repeatable tasks first, because that is where errors hide and where trust is earned.

## Questions

### Why build custom integrations instead of buying connectors?

Each connection had specific rules: which hours count against which work order, which forms are pre-filled for which job type, and when an invoice is allowed to be raised. Off-the-shelf connectors handled the simple fields but not those rules. Custom Apex REST let us put the rules where the job lives and test them with the rest of the org.

### Did the crews have to change how they work?

As little as possible. Technicians kept clocking hours in QuickBooks Time and filling site forms in Dashpivot, because those tools suit the field. What changed is that both now start from the Salesforce job and report back to it, so the office no longer copies information between them.

### Can this approach work with Field Service licences later?

Yes. The job, work order and appointment model maps onto Salesforce Field Service, so the contractor can add optimized scheduling and the mobile app later without rebuilding the integrations or the data model.

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SynconAI. https://synconai.com/case-studies/fire-protection-quote-to-invoice-on-salesforce