Quick answer
Three Make.com scenarios will reliably claw back around 15 hours of admin a week for a typical UK trades business. The first captures every lead from your website, missed calls, and Google profile into one tracked list. The second turns an accepted quote into a sent invoice and a chase schedule. The third runs the post-job follow-up: review request, planned-maintenance reminder, referral nudge. None of it requires code. Plan a Saturday morning to build the first one, then add the others over the following weekends.
Table of contents
- Why 15 hours a week is the real number
- What Make.com is, in plain English
- What you need before you start
- Workflow 1: Lead capture and triage
- Workflow 2: Quote to invoice with payment chase
- Workflow 3: Post-job follow-up engine
- Using AI to design and improve your workflows
- A note on MTD for Income Tax
- What the automation community is saying
- Helpful video tutorials
- Frequently asked questions
- My verdict
Make.com
Google Sheets
Gmail
XeroWhy 15 hours a week is the real number
The HeyBRB UK Admin Drain Report (March 2026, sample of 167 small businesses) put the average at 8 hours of pure admin a week. The Powered Now survey, published a couple of months later, put it at 7 hours just on paperwork. Both numbers ignore the bit nobody counts: the time spent thinking about the admin you have not done, the chasing emails on Sunday night, the trip to the cash and carry to print one missing invoice.
When I dig into the numbers with founders at Elite Heating, the realistic figure is closer to 15 hours once you include lead chasing, quote follow-up, invoice chasing, supplier reconciliation, certificate filing, and the daily WhatsApp triage. That is two full working days a week. For a small firm at £65 an hour, that is north of £25,000 a year of lost capacity.
The good news: three or four targeted automations remove the lion's share. You do not need an AI agent. You do not need a developer. You need Make.com, a Google account, your existing invoicing tool, and a quiet weekend.
The simple maths
15 hours a week at a £55 effective hourly rate is £825 a week. A $9 a month Make.com plan with a one-off £200 setup time pays back in the first week. Even if you halve my estimate, the payback is two weeks.
What Make.com is, in plain English
Make is a visual workflow tool. You drag boxes onto a canvas, each box represents an action in one of your existing apps (Gmail, Google Sheets, Xero, Stripe, your job-management system), and you connect them with lines that pass data between them. When something triggers the workflow (a form submission, a new row in a sheet, an inbound email) the scenario fires and walks through the boxes in order.
It costs nothing to test. The free plan gives you 1,000 operations a month, which is enough to prove the first workflow before you spend a penny. The Core plan at $9 a month gives you 10,000 operations and removes the 15-minute minimum interval, which matters for lead capture.
The three plans most trades businesses will ever consider:
| Plan | Monthly cost | Operations | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 | Building and testing your first scenario |
| Core | $9 | 10,000 | A single tradesperson or a two-van operation running 3-4 workflows |
| Pro | $16 | 10,000 | Anyone who wants priority execution and custom variables |
| Teams | $29 | 10,000 | Office staff sharing scenarios across multiple users |
Pricing source: make.com/en/pricing, checked June 2026.
Operations, not workflows
Each module run inside a scenario counts as one operation. A three-step workflow that fires 100 times in a month uses 300 operations. The Core plan covers roughly 3,000 to 3,300 three-module scenarios per month, which is more than enough for most trades businesses to run all three workflows in this guide with headroom.
What you need before you start
Set aside two hours for the first workflow. The other two will go quicker because the basics overlap. Have these accounts open and ready:
- A Make.com account. Sign up at make.com with a business email. Stay on Free until your first workflow is stable, then upgrade to Core.
- A Google account. You will use Sheets as your lead and job log, Gmail as your outbound channel, and Drive to store generated documents. The free Workspace tier is fine.
- Your invoicing tool of choice. Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, and Sage all have native Make modules. If you are still on Word templates and a PDF printer, this is a good moment to move.
- Your website's contact form. If your site is on WordPress, install WPForms or Fluent Forms. Webflow, Squarespace, and Wix all have native form modules. Powered Now, Jobber, and ServiceM8 have their own webhooks.
- A WhatsApp Business number. Not strictly required for the basic build, but it lets you bring missed-call leads into the same pipeline.
One thing to fix first
Standardise where your leads land. If half come into a personal Gmail and half into an old hello@ address you never check, the automation will not save you anything. Pick one inbox, one form, one phone number, and route everything there before you start.
Workflow 1: Lead capture and triage
This is the one that saves the most time and pays for itself fastest. Most trades businesses lose 10 to 30 percent of inbound leads to slow responses. Hamza Baig, who runs the Hamza Automates channel, calls this the missed-call text-back problem. The fix is the same whether the lead comes from a form, a missed call, or a Google Business message.
The scenario has four modules:
- Webhook (trigger). Make creates a unique URL. Paste it into your website form's "send to" field. Every submission fires the scenario.
- Google Sheets, add a row. One sheet, one row per lead. Columns: timestamp, name, phone, postcode, job type, source, status. Status starts as "new".
- Gmail, send an email. Acknowledge the lead in under a minute. Confirm you have their details. Tell them when you will be in touch. Promise a callback window, then keep it.
- Slack or Telegram (optional). A one-line ping to your phone: "New lead, John, SW18, boiler service." So you know without checking the sheet.
Total operations per lead: 3-4. Cost on Core: trivial. Time to build the first time: about 90 minutes, mostly setting up the connections. Once it is running, you stop losing leads to lag.
If you have a missed-call setup on a SIP phone or VOIP system, add a parallel branch: when a call lasts under 12 seconds, fire the same Google Sheets row with source set to "missed call" and the Gmail step swapped for a WhatsApp text-back. Twilio and Make have a native integration for this. For more on rescuing missed-call leads specifically, see our AI-powered lead response guide using ChatGPT, Make.com, and WhatsApp.
Skip the AI on this one
For the first build, do not bolt ChatGPT to the reply. A templated acknowledgement is faster, cheaper, and indistinguishable from a thoughtful tradesperson typing on a phone. Add AI later when you understand which leads actually need a custom response.
Workflow 2: Quote to invoice with payment chase
Invoicing and quote-chasing came top of the Powered Now survey when tradespeople were asked which task they would most want to automate. Over a third of respondents spend more than 20 minutes writing a single quote from scratch. For someone producing 6 to 10 quotes a week, that is 2 to 3 hours of work where a third never converts.
This workflow does not write the quote for you. It removes the manual handover from accepted quote to sent invoice, then chases the invoice until it gets paid. Setup is straightforward if your quoting and invoicing already live in the same tool. If they do not, this is the moment to consolidate.
The scenario sits on top of whichever invoicing tool you use. The same logic works in Xero, FreeAgent, QuickBooks, and Sage. The pattern is identical:
- Trigger. Watch your accepted-quotes list. In Xero that is "quote status changed to accepted". In FreeAgent it is the same event on an estimate.
- Create the invoice. Convert the quote into a draft invoice with the same line items, the same VAT treatment, the same due date logic (7, 14, or 30 days from today).
- Send it. Trigger the email-send action on the invoice. Most tools generate the PDF and email it in one step.
- Log the send. Add a row to a Google Sheet so you can see what is owed at a glance without opening the accounting app.
- Schedule the chase. Three reminders on days 7, 14, and 21 after the due date. Each one slightly firmer than the last. Stop chasing automatically once status changes to "paid".
The chase sequence is the bit that gets you paid. A 2024 Ford Pro survey found British tradespeople were owed £3.5 billion in late payments, with an average outstanding amount of £3,942 per tradesperson and an average delay of 35 days. Most of that is not bad customers. Most of it is uncomfortable founders who hate sending the second email.
VAT and MTD compliance
If you are VAT registered, the invoice created by Make must respect your VAT scheme. Set the default tax rate on each line item explicitly in the create-invoice module. Do not let Make guess. Test with one real invoice and check it in your accountant's system before you switch the scenario on for everything.
For a deeper walk-through of the accounting side of this workflow, see our companion piece on automating quote-to-invoice for heating engineers.
Workflow 3: Post-job follow-up engine
The third workflow is the one most trades businesses skip. Once the job is done and the invoice is paid, you move on. You should not. Three things happen after a job that quietly drive your next year of revenue: a 5-star review, a planned-maintenance subscription, and a referral. Automate all three and the compounding is enormous.
This scenario triggers off "invoice marked paid" in your accounting tool. From there it sends three messages over four weeks:
- Day 1, thank you and review request. Short, warm, one direct link to your Google Business review page. Send by email or SMS. The strongest signal that you delivered well is a five-star review left within 48 hours of the job finishing.
- Day 14, maintenance check-in. "Quick note, would you like us to put a service in the diary for next year?" If yes, Make adds the customer to a planned-maintenance Google Sheet with a reminder date.
- Day 28, referral nudge. "If you know anyone who needs a similar job, here is a £25 referral voucher." Track the referral code in a sheet so you can pay it out when someone uses it.
The maths is the same as workflow one. You are not selling. You are showing up at the points where a paying customer is most receptive. Review conversion at 48 hours is roughly 4x higher than at 7 days. Planned-maintenance conversion within a month of a finished job is roughly 6x higher than a cold pitch. The numbers will vary in your business, but the direction is reliable.
Keep messages short
Three sentences max. One link. No ALL CAPS. No "we hope you are well". The tone has to sound like you, not a CRM. Read it aloud before you save the template; if you would not text a mate that way, rewrite it.
For a playbook on the recurring-revenue side of this workflow, see our planned maintenance contract guide.
Using AI to design and improve your workflows
You do not need AI inside these workflows. You will benefit from AI when you build them.
Open Claude or ChatGPT and paste in something like: "I run a UK plumbing business. I want a Make.com scenario that picks up a new contact form submission, adds them to a Google Sheet, and sends them a confirmation email within 60 seconds. Walk me through the modules I need and the field mapping for each one." You will get a step-by-step build guide tailored to your tools, often in 30 seconds.
Make's own Maia assistant, launched in 2025, builds scenarios from natural-language descriptions. It is improving but still occasionally maps the wrong field, so treat its output as a draft. For optimisation, paste your scenario blueprint into Claude and ask "what could break this and how do I add error handling?" You will get a checklist of edge cases (empty fields, duplicate submissions, API failures) you would not have thought of.
If you want a broader view of where AI fits into a trades operation today, our guide to AI tools for tradespeople in 2026 covers the main free and paid options.
Don't put AI in the chase emails
It is tempting to wire ChatGPT into the invoice-chase step to "personalise" reminders. Do not. Customers can spot it, and a generic, polite reminder from a templated email is more effective than a falsely chatty AI rewrite. Save AI for the building, not the sending.
A note on MTD for Income Tax
From 6 April 2026, self-employed individuals with qualifying income over £50,000 must use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax. From April 2027 the threshold drops to £30,000, and from April 2028 to £20,000. That covers most full-time tradespeople.
You will need to keep digital records and submit quarterly summaries through MTD-compatible software. The good news: if your invoicing already lives in Xero, FreeAgent, QuickBooks, or Sage, you are already most of the way there. The automation workflows in this guide write into those systems, so the digital records take care of themselves.
The risk: HMRC's new points-based penalty system kicks in at four missed quarterly updates with a £200 fine. Build a Make scenario that pings you a week before each quarter-end if your figures are not filed. It is two modules and saves you a fine.
What the automation community is saying
Helpful video tutorials
Getting Started with Make (Integromat): 30-Minute Crash Course
Sahil Khosla
Make.com Tutorial for Beginners 2026 (Full Guide)
Metics Media
Ultimate Make.com Tutorial 2026 (Automate Google Sheets + Other Apps)
Stewart Gauld
How to Send Emails Automatically from Spreadsheet (with Make.com)
Automation Coach
I Built a $5000 AI Automation for Plumbing Companies You Can Copy
Hamza Automates
Full Plumbing Company Automation Walkthrough
Hamza Automates
Frequently asked questions
No. Every workflow in this guide is built by dragging modules onto a canvas and connecting them with lines. If you can use a smartphone, you can build these.
The Free plan covers building and testing. Once you switch the first workflow on for real traffic, expect to need the Core plan at $9 a month. That is roughly £7.20 in GBP at current rates. The three workflows in this guide together fit comfortably inside the Core plan's 10,000 monthly operations.
Plan 90 minutes for workflow one if it is your first scenario. The other two will take 45 to 60 minutes each because you are repeating the same patterns. Most of the time goes on the initial app connections, not on Make itself.
Make has native modules for Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent, Sage, Zoho, FreshBooks, and dozens more. If yours is not on the list, check whether it supports webhooks. Most modern invoicing tools do, and a webhook gets you to the same place.
Make is GDPR compliant and offers an EU-hosted region. The bit you control is what data you store in Google Sheets and how long you keep it. Add an internal rule: archive leads older than two years, delete personal data of customers who ask, document your retention policy on your privacy page.
Yes. n8n is open source, self-hostable, and very capable. The trade-off is technical: you either run it on your own server or pay for n8n Cloud. For most trades businesses Make is the simpler starting point. If you have an IT-confident person on the team and want to run dozens of workflows, n8n becomes the cheaper option at scale.
Make emails you when a scenario errors. Inside the platform, every scenario has an execution history showing what ran, what failed, and why. Set up an error-handling branch on workflow two that pings you on Slack or by SMS, so you find out within minutes rather than the day someone shouts about a missing invoice.
My verdict
Start with the lead capture workflow this weekend
The fastest way to lose interest in automation is to plan all three workflows on a whiteboard before you build any of them. Build workflow one in a single sitting. Run it on live traffic for a week. Then build workflow two. Three weekends, three workflows, 15 hours back. Plan-to-implementation should be measured in days, not quarters. The maths is in your favour the moment you start.
