Is FieldStacker a good CRM for exterior painting door-to-door?
Yes for the canvassing and the money side of painting sales. Exterior painting is the rare trade where the buying signal is visible from the sidewalk — chalking on a south wall, failed caulk at the window trim, bare wood on the fascia — so the job is finding those houses fast and never losing one. The knock map, drawn territories around an active job site, custom dispositions, GPS-verified team knocks, route building and 1099 financials all work for a painting crew today. Your takeoff and proposal tool keeps measuring siding and pricing the repaint; FieldStacker runs the street around it.
Does FieldStacker measure siding, calculate gallons or write painting proposals?
No — takeoff, gallons and proposals stay in your estimating stack. Exterior takeoff is real work — siding square footage by elevation, window and door counts, substrate (wood lap, T1-11, cedar shake, stucco, fiber cement, aluminum), prep level, coats, sheen, ladder versus lift, and whether the house is pre-1978 and falls under the EPA lead-safe RRP rule. Tools like PaintScout, Estimate Rocket, Jobber or Housecall Pro exist for that, HOVER or a laser measure and a wheel handle the measurements, and Sherwin-Williams ColorSnap or the Benjamin Moore visualizer handle color. FieldStacker's own doorstep quote builder is alarm-native today. Keep your estimating stack; FieldStacker runs the street around it.
How do painting crews use territories around an active job site?
This is the single best use of the product for a painter. A crew spraying a house on Thursday is the strongest proof you will ever have, so trace a territory around that address, load the doors inside it, and knock the block while the truck and the ladders are still out front. Every knock is dispositioned and GPS-verified, so the canvasser working the north side never re-knocks the south side, and the whole radius gets covered before the scaffolding comes down. Do that around every job all season and the yard sign stops being decoration and starts being a lead source.
Can I work my old customer list for the repaint cycle?
Yes — import it. Exterior repaints typically come back around every five to ten years depending on substrate and exposure, which means the customers you painted six or seven seasons ago are your warmest doors this spring. Import them from a CSV or another CRM and the addresses are geocoded automatically, so an old spreadsheet turns into pins on the knock map. Add a "repaint due" disposition, route the ones that cluster, and knock them with a reason no cold canvasser can match: you painted this house, you know exactly what was on it, and you know what has failed since.
Can I track painting commissions, chargebacks and 1099 taxes?
Yes, and painting needs it more than most trades. Log the job, see your real commission on your own percentage or gross-profit split, and net out the chargebacks this trade actually produces — a three-day cancellation under the door-to-door cooling-off rule, a job repriced after the crew finds rot the measure missed, a discount you gave away at the table, or a final balance the homeowner never paid. Mileage is captured automatically at the IRS standard rate, which matters when you drive to six measures a day, and a quarterly set-aside builds so the off-season tax bill is not a surprise.
We only sell exteriors seven or eight months a year. Does the pricing work for that?
It is one of the reasons the pricing is built this way. Every plan is flat and month-to-month, starting at $30/mo, with a 14-day free trial that takes no credit card, no seat minimums and no annual contract. If your season closes in November you are not locked into a twelve-month agreement to keep a map you cannot use until March. Add crew seats when the spring push starts and drop back down when the last house is done. Most canvassing platforms sell annual, per-seat contracts, which is a poor fit for a trade that stops when the surface temperature does.
