Trade partner program
Tally is a referral program plus a two-way work ledger. The plumbers and HVAC shops in your market send you jobs and get paid for it. When they need you — or you need them — the work goes on a running tally instead of a check.
Neither side keeps the only copy. Both read the same account.
A plumber is inside the house when the pipe bursts. He can hand that job to anyone. You pay him to hand it to you — every time, tracked, and settled without an argument about who sent what.
When his guy floods a house, you absorb it on the tally instead of sending an invoice. Nobody else in your market is offering that, which is why his next twenty jobs come to you instead of to whoever knocked last.
Referral fees are paid out of the invoice they generated, never before it bills. The ledger moves no money at all. It is the rare growth program that never competes with payroll for the same dollar.
The reframe
Every restoration company already has trade partners. Almost none of them own the relationship — they rent it, one referral at a time, and it leaves when the rep does.
What it is
Either one works alone. Together they make a trade partner structurally unable to justify sending work anywhere else.
01 — The Referral
A plumber walks into a burst supply line on a call that has nothing to do with him. You pay him to hand it to you — the technician who found it, and the person who runs the shop.
The only half that moves cash, and it is paid out of the invoice it created.
02 — The Trade Line
You do the mitigation, bill your retail rate, and take no cash. It sits on an open line between the two of you. He settles later in cash, in his own plumbing labour, or any mix he chooses.
This is the half nobody else offers, and the reason the relationship sticks.
Conceptually
He sends you a job, or one of you does work for the other. Nothing changes about how either company operates — the trucks roll the same way they did last week.
Both sides invoice at their normal retail rate, and the amount goes on the account instead of into an envelope. Referral fees post the same way.
Both columns, the net position, and the jobs still in flight. He settles in cash, in work, or leaves it running. Most partners never write a check at all.
Open by protocol
Tally ships an MCP server and a REST API, so the ledger is reachable by your job-management, estimating and accounting systems — and by whatever AI assistant your office uses. Jobs and invoices flow in; statements and balances flow out.
The design rule
The record belongs to both parties, not to a platform. If you leave, you leave with your account history in a format you can read. That is the one property that makes a trade partner willing to keep score with you at all.
What it connects to
No rip-and-replace, and no second system of record for your production team to maintain.
Watch it run
Five moments over about eight weeks. Tap through them and watch the account change — it is the only thing either side ever has to look at.
Cash that changed hands across all five steps: none. He never wrote you a check. You never wrote him one.
Nothing on the line yet. A partner at zero is a partner in perfect standing.
The instrument
This is what the program actually is to a partner. Everything else is how it got here.
| Date | Job | Retail |
|---|---|---|
| Supply line, 2nd floor | 04 Aug | 4,200 |
| Water heater failure, finished basement | 13 Aug | 5,850 |
| Drain stack, powder room | 27 Aug | 1,400 |
| Date | Job | Retail |
|---|---|---|
| Re-pipe after demo — job 2841 | 09 Aug | 3,800 |
| Fixture set, 4 units — job 2866 | 21 Aug | 2,000 |
| Referral credit — owner election, job 2903 | 29 Aug | 500 |
| Opened | Job | Stage | Est. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Slab leak, kitchen & hall | 25 Aug | Drying · day 3 of 4 | +6,400 |
| Rough-in, job 2871 — committed | 22 Aug | Scheduled 04 Sep | −4,200 |
The open-jobs block is the one most programs miss. A partner at $5,150 with jobs in flight is really at $7,350. Send it the same day every month whether there was activity or not — the rhythm is the trust.
What it costs
Your trade partners are never charged. They get the statement, the balance and the settlement options for free — charging the smaller side would kill adoption at the exact relationship the program exists to build.
Mitigation gross margin runs 70–80% industry-wide.
This models the referral half only. It counts no value for the trade line — the plumbing you buy at your partner’s cost instead of retail, and the partner who stops taking your competitor’s calls.
Go deeper
You have the whole idea already. What follows is how it is actually run — open only what you need.
The money
The line worth staring at is the second from the bottom.
| Line | You | Your partner | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mitigation billed at retail | +4,000 | −4,000 | Your normal invoice, posted to the tally instead of collected. |
| Your direct cost to deliver | −1,800 | — | Equipment-days and labour. Illustrative — use your own. |
| Plumbing billed back at retail | −4,000 | +4,000 | His normal rate, on your job. Clears the line. |
| His direct cost to deliver | — | −1,800 | His number, not yours. |
| Cash that changed hands | 0 | 0 | The point. |
| Value received for cost incurred | 4,000 for 1,800 | 4,000 for 1,800 | Each side buys at cost and is paid at retail. |
Illustrative figures. Direct costs are placeholders — replace them with your actuals before you price a line.
Be exact about what this number is, because partners assume the opposite. It is the most a partner is allowed to owe you before the rules change — a limit on his borrowing, not a minimum he must maintain. A partner sitting at zero is in perfect standing, and he can clear to zero any day he likes.
Set each line at one month of that partner’s expected mitigation volume, and never open one smaller than three typical jobs. With jobs at $4,000–$8,000 the smallest line worth opening is around $20,000; the largest partners top out near $50,000.
A line that is too small breaks the promise on first use. A $10,000 line puts a partner at half to four-fifths of it on a single incident — so the first oops he ever brings you triggers a credit conversation, at exactly the moment the program was supposed to prove it had his back.
Running it
Not headcount — structure. A shop with a general manager has someone whose job is to feel the cost of mistakes across a fleet and who can sign a credit line. A shop without one has an owner in a truck who wants cash in his hand. You can tell which in one question.
Pathway A · referral only
No back office and nobody to administer a ledger. Cash-equivalent, immediate, zero paperwork.
Pathway B · referral + trade line
Someone carries the cost of mistakes across a fleet and protects an insurance loss run. Lead with the line; let the fee close it.
The technician is paid identically either way. A plumber’s $250 does not depend on how his employer is structured, and a program where it did would be indefensible the first time two techs compared notes.
A rep manages about one drop-off a day, because plumbers are only reachable in a narrow morning window — thirty a month. Against a market of a thousand-plus plumbers that is years to touch each one once, and no route map fixes it.
So count shops, not plumbers. Sort your market list, take the top fifteen with a general manager, and that is one rep’s entire territory. Everything else is a dialer and a mailed card for a few dollars a day. One rep owns fifteen accounts by name. Automation owns the rest.
Open on their risk, not your service
“You’re going to have a guy put a wrench through a pipe this year. When it happens you’ve got two bad options: eat it out of pocket, or file a claim and watch your premium sit high for three years.”
The third option
“Here’s a third one. You call us, we’re on site same day, we dry it, we bill you our normal rate — and you don’t write a check unless you want to. It goes on a tally. When we need a plumber on one of our jobs, you send a truck, bill us your normal rate, it comes off the tally. Pay it in cash any time you like, or never.”
Then, and only then, the money
“And separately — any time one of your guys walks into a flooded house that isn’t your fault, he calls us, he gets $250 and you get $250. Every job, every time.”
Close small
“That’s the whole thing. Two pieces. Want me to leave the one-pager?”
Never pitch technicians before you have pitched the owner. Top-down, in writing, or not at all.
The rules
These constraints are not fine print — they are part of the design, and they are why the program survives contact with a carrier, an auditor, or a state regulator.
At scale
A network’s members are restoration companies, so this is the same offer read from one level up. Most vendor partnerships ask a group to lend its credibility to something the member funds out of hope. This one is funded out of the invoice it creates, which is why a member can start it in a month where cash is tight.
Members report referred jobs and traded labour as a line item. First-to-market positioning in a region or vertical, and a structure that recognises the origin relationship as the program spreads.
Agreement templates, credit-line sizing, segmentation logic, the field script and the monthly cadence — plus the ledger that runs it. The playbook is the product as much as the app is.
A named champion, a webinar or meeting slot, and a place in the comms calendar. We build, operate, support and train. Distribution is the only thing we cannot do from our side.
On “we already do this internally.” The shops that say it are doing it on a spreadsheet one side controls, reconciled by a rep with a printed report once a month, with no open-jobs position and no record the partner can verify. That is not the same program — it is the reason the relationship quietly decays the first time the two sides remember a number differently.
Next
The fastest way to know whether this fits is a thirty-minute conversation about your market, your three biggest trade relationships, and what they are worth to you today.