If you run an electrical, plumbing, solar or security business in South Africa, you already know where your work comes from. Not a web form. Not a formal email. It comes in on WhatsApp: a voice note at nine at night, three photos of a distribution board, "can you come look at my geyser this week?"
That chat is the start of a job worth real money. And in most trades businesses it lives on one person's phone. The quote gets typed up later in a Word template. The job goes on a whiteboard or in a group chat. The invoice gets captured again in the accounting package. Somewhere between those four places, things fall through: the enquiry nobody answered, the quote nobody followed up, the job that was done but never invoiced.
We built CRM Sorted to close those gaps. It is a business system for South African trades businesses where your own WhatsApp Business number is a full working surface, not an afterthought.
Why generic CRMs miss how trades actually work
Most CRMs were designed for sales teams sitting at desks. They are good at pipelines and terrible at site visits, compliance certificates, technicians in bakkies and customers who would rather send a voice note than fill in a form.
So trades businesses end up with a CRM nobody updates, because updating it is extra work on top of the real work. A useful CRM for a trades business has to do the opposite: meet the work where it already happens, which in South Africa means WhatsApp, and turn it into quotes, jobs and invoices without anyone retyping anything.
Your WhatsApp number becomes a shared team inbox
You connect your own WhatsApp Business number to CRM Sorted. Customers keep messaging the number they already have. The difference is what happens on your side: every conversation lands in a shared inbox, tied to the customer's record, where anyone on the team can see it.
Text, photos, documents and voice notes all come through. You can assign a conversation to a colleague, search old chats, and see at a glance what is still unread. When the person who usually answers is on site or on leave, the enquiry does not sit on their phone waiting.
An answer at nine at night, instead of silence
When a customer messages after hours, an assistant replies. It answers using the business details and answers you have set up, records a booking request so the enquiry is not lost, and hands the conversation to a person when it cannot help. If a customer is unhappy, it flags that to your team.
The important part is what it cannot do. The customer-facing assistant has exactly four abilities: look up that customer's own details, save their details, create a booking request, and escalate to a human. It has no way to read your quotes, your pricing or anyone else's records, because it was never given a tool that can. That is a privacy guarantee built into the design, not a promise written into a prompt.
It only ever replies to a customer who has messaged you first. It does not start conversations or send broadcasts.
Run the business by sending a message
Staff numbers get something different. When someone registered as staff messages the same number, they reach an assistant that can work inside the CRM for them, within their own permissions. Look up a customer. Create a task. Log time against a project. Send an email from the business mailbox. Attach a photo from the chat to the right customer record.
Voice notes work, in English and in Afrikaans. A technician can talk through what they need instead of typing on a cracked screen in a ceiling.
Some things do not need AI at all. A technician who texts "on my way", "on site" or "done" updates the status of their job and starts or stops their timer. That works even with AI switched off, costs nothing per message, and cannot get it wrong.
Quotes your customer can approve from their phone
Quotes in CRM Sorted come from your own priced catalogue, so every line is consistent. You can offer the customer options on one quote, for example a standard geyser and a solar upgrade, and revise a quote as a new version without losing the old one.
The customer gets a link. They open it on their phone with no login, pick an option, approve or decline, and leave a comment. Your cost price and margin are never shown to them.
From approved quote to signed-off job
An approved quote becomes a job in one step, with the customer, site and scope carried across. Assign technicians, track the status, and keep every photo and file on the job.
On site, the customer signs the job sheet on the technician's device. Reusable compliance checklists attach to the job, and a job cannot be closed until its checklist is complete. If your work ends with a Certificate of Compliance, that means the paperwork is part of the workflow instead of something chased afterwards.
Invoices that land in Sage, Xero or Zoho, and get checked
Raise the invoice from the quote or the job, including deposit and balance invoices, and email it from your own mailbox. CRM Sorted connects to Sage Business Cloud Accounting, Xero and Zoho Books, and pushes the finalised invoice into your books for you. Pushing it again updates the same invoice rather than creating a duplicate.
Two details matter here. First, CRM Sorted never calculates VAT itself. It sends the line items and lets your accounting package work out the tax, so your totals match your books. Second, after every push it reads the invoice back and checks that your accounting package saved what was sent. If something is different, it tells you, instead of reporting success.
When you connect, it also pulls the customers, items and tax rates already in your books, and helps you match them to your CRM catalogue, so you are not building everything twice.
Know which jobs actually made money
The job costing report puts what you quoted, what you invoiced, what it cost and the hours spent side by side, with the margin. There are also reports for on-time completion, hours per client and outstanding invoices. You can see which kind of work is worth chasing and which is quietly losing you money.
What is coming next
Not shipped yet, but next on the list: service and maintenance reminders. Customers who opt in will get a WhatsApp reminder when equipment you installed is due for a service, which turns one installation into a long-term relationship. We will announce it here when it is live.
What this means for your business
- Every enquiry gets captured, even after hours, even when the person who usually answers is on a job.
- Quotes go out faster and get approved on the customer's phone, with your margin kept private.
- Jobs close with the paperwork done: signed job sheet, completed checklist, photos on file.
- Invoices reach your books without double-capture, and you know they arrived correctly.
- You can see which jobs make money, not just which ones keep you busy.
Want to see the whole flow in one go? Follow one job from a WhatsApp "hi" to a paid invoice, or browse every CRM Sorted feature.
See it on your own work: book a demo
The fastest way to judge whether CRM Sorted fits is to see it on the kind of jobs you actually do. Book a live demo and we will walk you through it using your own quotes, your own job types and your own accounting package. No hard sell, no jargon.