Industries / Painting
Walls minus openings, gallons by the coat, and a color the customer signed off before day one.
Works today
Book estimate walks, send proposals, line up multi-day jobs, keep every color on file.
Apex turns room dimensions into paint quantities and a good-better-best proposal, then schedules the job in whole days with a color-approval gate and a weather hold on exteriors.
Who it is for: Interior and exterior painting contractors running multi-day jobs with a crew, from one-room repaints to whole-home exteriors.
What generic schedulers get wrong for painting
Estimating and crew scheduling are split
Many painters use one tool to price and another to assign crews. The estimate never becomes the crew's day.
Surfaces, not rooms, set the price
Walls, ceilings, trim, doors and cabinets each have their own rate and coats. A single room line loses the margin.
Color approval is a gate
Starting before the customer signs off a color is the costly mistake. It should block the start.
Old homes carry a lead rule
A home built before 1978 triggers lead-safe work. A flag at intake saves a stop-work.
Exteriors run on the forecast
A dry window, not a date, starts an exterior job.
Drawn in code for painting
A day in a painting business
- Estimate
- Interior job
- Exterior job
- Cabinet refinish
- Touch-up
Openings come off the wall area. Quantities flow to the material list.
The Monday exterior waits for a signed color. Gates are in build.
- Estimate
- Proposal
- Color signed
- Material ordered
- Production
- Walk-through
- Touch-up
- Paid
The start date opens only after the color is signed.
A painting week: an estimate with gallons, a three-day interior and an exterior held for color and rain. Illustration of planned screens: entries are examples, not customer data, and not every screen shown is built yet.
How painting runs in Apex: the key settings
Starter settings for this trade. You change any of them. Nothing here is a promise about your numbers.
How jobs get booked
An estimate window, then full-day production blocks across consecutive days.
Stops in a day
About 2 jobs a day for estimators; one crew per production job.
Routing
Dynamic cluster for estimate visits.
Who says yes
Owner confirms every estimate and start date.
How you price
Per surface or per square foot with coats, labor plus material, good-better-best paint lines, deposit and progress payments.
Repeat customers
Repaint reminder at five to seven years.
Follow-up calls
Estimate follow-up at day 2 and day 5; touch-up and warranty check at day 30.
Review requests
Review request after the walk-through and touch-ups, once.
What we ask the customer
- Interior or exterior
- Rooms or square feet and ceiling height
- Wall condition and prep level
- Home build year
- Color and finish known?
- Furniture moved? Occupied?
- Trim, doors, cabinets
Photos and papers to collect
- Photos of each room or elevation
- Prep and damage photos
- Before and after photos
- Signed color approval
Rules to watch
- Contractor license where the state requires it
- Lead-safe work flag for homes built before 1978
- Insurance certificate
- HOA color rules
What you get as a painting business
8 of 16 work today. The other 8 are coming soon.
Paint takeoff from room dimensions
Perimeter times height minus openings, coats and coverage into gallons.
Good-better-best proposal
Three paint lines and prep levels with margin guardrails.
Estimate follow-up at day 2 and day 5
A text and call task that stop on a reply or signature.
Estimate-visit windows
Morning and afternoon windows for walk-throughs.
Photos required for exterior quotes
Exterior requests need photos before confirmation.
Route density for estimates
Estimates cluster by area.
Repaint reminder at five to seven years
Stops if they scheduled.
Starting pack for painting
Full-day production blocks and owner approval as owner-confirmed defaults.
Color-approval gate
The start date cannot be confirmed until the color is signed off.
Multi-day production blocks
A job holds consecutive days for a crew.
Lead-safe flag for older homes
Homes built before 1978 route to a lead-safe checklist.
Paint and sundries order timed to the start
A material list generated from the takeoff.
Weather hold for exteriors
Rain or wind pushes the start and tells the customer.
Change order for extra repair
A rotted-board repair priced and approved before the crew proceeds.
Punch list and touch-up visit
Items photographed, assigned and closed.
Deposit and progress invoices
Deposit at approval, progress and final at completion.
The tools in painting, and where we can honestly do better
Tools our research found in use for painting: PaintScout, Jobber, Housecall Pro, Tradify, Fergus. Listing a tool is not a claim about it.
Housecall Pro
Its official pricing page reserves route optimization, advanced proposals and recurring service, and API access for higher tiers.
Vendor's own page: Housecall Pro pricing pageWhat Apex does about it: Proposal options are built in the engine, and the pricing page lists what each plan includes.
Jobber
Its pricing page lists AI Receptionist and Marketing Suite as separately priced add-ons.
Vendor's own page: Jobber pricing pageWhat Apex does about it: Plan prices are public, and texts run on your own provider or the prepaid wallet.
When another tool may be the better choice: PaintScout is painter-specific estimating and is widely used. Our research on its limits comes from competitor-written pages, so we make no claim against it. If you want estimating only, it may be enough.
What it costs for painting
Apex lists three public plans, priced by users: Solo $59 per month for 1 user, Crew $99 for 2 to 5 users, Business $129 for 6 users plus $10 for each extra user. No plan includes any texts, AI phone minutes or AI usage. For this trade we would start you on Crew. A painting company with two crews fits Crew.
Jobber lists Core at $29 to $49, Connect at $99 to $139 and Grow at $149 to $199 or more per month. Housecall Pro lists Basic at $59, Essentials at $149 and Max at $299 per month billed annually, or $79, $189 and $329 billed monthly. These are public figures as read on 2026-10-06, verify before buying. Seat counts and included features differ between vendors, and we have not verified every one, so compare your own crew size on the pricing page before you decide. Texts and AI run on your own provider account or a prepaid wallet, and card processing is at the processor's own rate.