The emergency call comes in. Your plumbing business already knows what to do.
A water heater lets go in a finished basement at 4:15 on a Friday. You have two trucks on scheduled work, one guy forty minutes out on a drain, and a homeowner standing in an inch of water. Plumbing runs on interruption. The schedule you made in the morning is not the day you actually have. North Star is a custom operations system MinnSight builds and runs so the interruption has somewhere to go besides your phone.
No call required. Flat monthly, no per-tech fees.
Dispatch that survives the interruption
Every plumbing day has a plan and then a real day. The question is what it costs you to move between the two. North Star puts the full board in front of whoever is dispatching: who is where, what is still open, which jobs have hard windows, and which ones can slide to tomorrow without a callback from an angry customer. Moving a job is a drag, not a round of phone calls. The tech's phone updates, the customer gets the new window, and the job that got pushed does not fall off the board entirely, which is the part that usually costs you money. Nothing is stored in one person's memory, so when the dispatcher is at lunch and the emergency lands anyway, the next person can see the same picture and make the same call.
Truck stock and the second supply run
The most expensive hour in a plumbing day is the one spent driving back for a fitting. North Star can hold what is on each truck and what each job type usually consumes, so the tech leaving for a sewer line replacement is not guessing at what to load. Parts used get logged against the job, which does two things: it puts the material on the invoice instead of into thin air, and it tells you what your restock list actually looks like on Monday. Over a few months, you can see which job types eat parts you never billed for. A three-truck shop losing forty dollars of unbilled material per job is losing real money by the quarter, and it never shows up as a line item anywhere until you start capturing it.
Permits, inspections, and the file the city wants
Water heater swaps, backflow devices, gas lines, and repipes all come with paperwork, and the paperwork tends to live in a truck folder or an email thread. North Star attaches permit numbers, inspection dates, pass and fail results, backflow test reports, and license information to the job itself. When a rough-in passes and the final is scheduled two weeks out, that gap is visible instead of forgotten. When a property sells three years later and someone wants the record of the gas line you ran, it is one search. If you carry a master license and journeyman hours matter for your crew, that record can live in the system too, in the same place as the work it belongs to.
Get paid at the sink, not three weeks later
Plumbing invoices go stale fast. The customer who was grateful about the backed-up main on Saturday is much harder to reach on the following Thursday. North Star lets the tech close the job on site: work performed, parts used, photos of the old and new, price, and payment. What is still owed is one screen, sorted by age, not a report someone has to run. You can see the $780 drain job from nine days ago sitting unpaid next to the $6,200 repipe with a deposit on it. Aging stops being something you discover at month end. For commercial and property management accounts that pay on their own schedule, the terms live on the account so nobody is guessing whether it is net 30 or net 45.
The day you planned, and the day you got
A homeowner calls Saturday morning about a sewer backup. Your on-call tech drives out, finds it is a job needing a jetter he did not bring, and comes back Monday. Two trips, one billable.
The intake captures symptoms and the property's prior line work, which shows a jetting from two years back. He loads the jetter the first time and clears it in one visit.
A tech replaces a pressure tank and uses about $180 in fittings and a new expansion tank. None of it makes it onto the invoice because he wrote it on the back of the work order and the office never saw it.
Parts get logged on the job before he leaves the driveway. The material lands on the invoice automatically and shows up on the restock list the same night.
A rough-in for a bathroom addition passes inspection in April. The final never gets scheduled. In June the general contractor calls, annoyed, because the project cannot close and nobody at your office knew it was waiting.
The job stays open with the final inspection as an unscheduled step. It shows on the open-work list every week until someone books it.
Built around how you actually dispatch
North Star brings your whole plumbing business into one place. We shape it around the way your board already runs, then look after it for you.
Pricing is flat and does not move when you put another truck on the road. The three levels and what they include are on the pricing page.
See North Star pricingStart with what your shop is missing
Help your team suggest the right extras without the hard sell. We build guide cards from the details you already have for each customer and job.
See pricingNot ready for the whole system? Grab one of these yourself, no call needed.
Browse all toolsOur tools cover the common needs. If your audit turns up something specific, or you already have an idea, we build that too.
Start with the free auditWeighing the usual names?
Honest, side-by-side breakdowns of MinnSight against the tools businesses usually weigh.
What are you leaving on the table?
Assumes 3 jobs a week slip through from missed follow-ups, double-bookings, and quotes that never went out. North Star keeps every job in one place. Adjust the sliders to match your business.
Get Your Free AuditBuilt for Every Type of Plumbing Company
Look at a working board
What you are looking at is one worked example, filled in ahead of time so there is something real to click. Take the owner view, the field view, or the customer view and move around the system.
See the live demoQuestions from plumbing shops
Ready for the day
to stop running you?
Show us how a week of emergency calls, scheduled work, and unpaid invoices moves through your office right now. The free audit comes back as a written plan, not a pitch, and you never have to book time on a calendar to get it. Ask if you want a guided look at a working setup.
Built for service businesses in Minnesota. No call required.