Leads

What lands in Leads

• Live Assistant captures — leads taken by your AI assistant on phone calls and text conversations. See The AI phone assistant.
• Website contact-form submissions — and leads created through the Leads API, which arrive with the Website badge.
• Manual adds — leads you or your technicians enter by hand.
• Addresses on new leads are verified against Google at capture.

The Source column shows a channel badge for how each lead arrived, plus any human-entered source like "Google Search":

Filter the table with the status tabs: All / New / Contacted / Walkthrough / Converted / Archived. Each row also has a ⋮ menu of quick actions — Convert to Customer, Schedule Walkthrough, Mark as Contacted, Mark as Converted (no customer), and Archive/Restore — so you can work leads without opening them. (Convert to Customer here opens the full customer form; the one-step Route Fit conversion lives on the lead's own page.)

The lead page

Click any row to open the lead's full page: contact info, the intake notes or transcript, and quick action buttons (these need the "Manage website leads" permission):

• Mark Contacted — record that you've reached out, without changing anything else.
• Schedule Walkthrough — opens the Schedule Quote Walkthrough page to put a quote visit on a route (full steps below).
• Mark Converted — set the lead to Converted without creating a customer record. Use it when the person is already in your customer list or the deal closed outside Pool Founder. In the table's row menu the same action is labeled Mark as Converted (no customer) to make the distinction explicit.
• Archive / Restore — retire a lead, or bring it back.

Converting is not in that header row. Below the details, the Route Fit card carries Convert & Schedule (creates the customer, service location, job, and route stop in one confirm) and Adjust (the older full customer form with the lead prefilled) — alongside ranked route options and a suggested per-visit rate. Full details: Route Fit. The ⋮ menu on the Leads table still offers the older Convert to Customer action.

Edit (next to the status badge) makes the lead's details editable in place — first and last name, phone, email, service address, service needed, and notes — then Save. This is handy for filling in what an AI call or text didn't capture.

A lead can also carry the bodies of water at the property — the pool, spa, or hot tub they're asking about, with its gallons, sanitizer, and surface. Those details let Route Fit estimate chemicals from similar pools you already service, and they transfer to the service location when the lead converts. See Lead pool details.

Everything connected to a lead

Below the lead's details, the page gathers all the activity tied to it:

• Follow-ups — the automated text sequence for this lead, plus its whole timeline. Covered in its own section below.
• AI Scheduling Proposals — appointments the assistant proposed for this lead. Pending ones show "Approve & schedule" / "Decline" for users with the "Approve scheduling" permission; decided ones show Scheduled or Declined badges.
• Calls — every AI-answered call with an outcome badge. Click a row to expand the transcript and any message taken.
• Texts — a conversation preview with an Open thread link that jumps to that exact conversation in the Phone inbox.

New-lead notifications link straight to the lead's page on the web. On mobile, tapping a "new lead" push opens the call that captured it, and that call screen has a "Lead from this call" link through to the lead.

Follow-up texts and the Follow-ups card

Every lead page carries a Follow-ups card: the state of the automated text sequence for that lead, and a timeline of everything it has (and has not) sent. It shows on closed leads too, because "why did this lead archive itself?" is answered there. The sequence itself is the Lead follow-up automation on Communication → Phone → Automated texts — off by default for the whole company. See texting and the Phone inbox.

The badge on the card is one of four:

• Pause (shown while On) stops the sequence for this lead alone and cancels anything already booked — the "I've got this one" button when you have picked the phone up yourself. Resume (shown while Paused) re-plans from where the lead actually is now rather than replaying a stale schedule. Both need the "Manage website leads" permission.
• When nothing has overridden it, the card reads: "Automated texts keep chasing this lead until they reply, convert, or you pause them."
• The timeline underneath is the lead's whole life: "Lead came in", "Address verified", "First reply texted"/"First reply emailed", "Status changed to …", "Follow-ups scheduled: never contacted, walkthrough reminder, …", "Follow-up text sent (gone quiet)", "Follow-ups paused"/"Follow-ups resumed", "Converted to a customer", and "Archived automatically after no reply".
• Skipped steps are on the timeline too, with the reason in plain English — "No follow-up sent (never contacted) — someone had already contacted them", or "they texted back", "the lead was converted or archived", "follow-ups are paused", "lead follow-ups are turned off", "that step is turned off", "they replied STOP", "no phone number", "the walkthrough changed", "waiting for your approval", "quiet hours ended before it could send", "your daily text limit was full", and so on. Nothing goes unexplained.

Which leads can be texted

• A lead who called you or texted you is always eligible — they started the conversation.
• A lead from your website form or the Leads API is texted only if it arrived with smsConsent: true, meaning the person ticked a texting-consent box on your form. Without it the lead is followed up by email only, and the Follow-ups card goes to Off with the consent reason quoted in the table above.
• Both <code>POST /api/v1/leads</code> and the public form endpoint <code>POST /api/website-lead</code> accept the field. Recommended checkbox wording: "Text me about my request. Msg &amp; data rates may apply. Reply STOP to opt out." See API keys and the Leads API.
• Pool Founder does not supply an embeddable contact form. You build your own form and post it to the endpoint — which is also why the consent checkbox is yours to add.

Schedule a walkthrough from the web

Schedule Walkthrough (in the lead page's quick actions, or in the table's ⋮ menu) opens the Schedule Quote Walkthrough page — pick a technician, then click a date on the month calendar. A summary panel builds as you go:

• The selected date and technician.
• The route the walkthrough will land on, with its current stop count — e.g. "Route: Monday North (12 stops)".
• If the technician has no route that day, the panel warns "No route exists for this day. A route will need to be created first." and the Schedule Walkthrough button stays disabled — the web flow only schedules onto existing routes.

Scheduling adds the walkthrough to that route as an unplanned stop (category Quote Walkthrough) carrying the lead's name, phone, and address, and moves the lead to the Walkthrough status tab. On mobile the flow is simpler and can fall back to the open pool — see below.

Add a lead manually — and the Lead API

Add Lead (top right of the Leads page) creates a lead by hand. No single field is required — a name, a phone number, an email, or an address is enough to save the lead, so you can capture "the blue house on Maple" mid-call and fill in the rest later. Everything else (source, service, notes, bodies of water) is optional. Converting the lead into a customer still asks for a first name and a phone or email.

The Source field is a searchable picker that comes pre-seeded with common answers — Google Search, Website, Referral, Phone Call, Walk-in, Social Media, Nextdoor, Yard Sign, Door Hanger — merged with any sources your company has used before. Type something new and click Create "…" to add your own; it shows up in the Source column and joins the picker for next time.

The Lead API button next to it jumps to the API page under Company Settings, where API keys and the endpoint docs live — that's how you push leads in automatically from Zapier or custom code. See API keys and the Leads API.

The automatic first reply

When a lead comes in through a website contact form, Pool Founder emails the prospect back within seconds, branded as your company — your logo, your colors, and your custom sending domain if you've verified one. The reply confirms their request was received and says someone will follow up. The time from submission to first reply is recorded on the lead.

• It never states a day, a time, a technician, or a price — it acknowledges the request and hands off to a human.
• Phone calls and inbound texts don't use this reply — those are answered live by the assistant in the moment.
• The reply goes by text instead of email only if your company has finished 10DLC texting registration and turned the text option on. Text auto-replies require a business line of your own (the $25/mo add-on) plus finished registration — companies on the free call-forwarding path can't use them, because texting can only run on a line Pool Founder provides. See Phone setup.

Work leads from the mobile app

The whole Leads section is also in the technician mobile app: Route tab → actions list → Sales → Leads (needs the "View website leads" permission and an internet connection). See Mobile invoices and leads.

• Same list, same status filter chips, and the same channel badges — with tap-to-call and tap-to-email on each lead's page.
• The same quick actions work with the "Manage website leads" permission: edit in place, Mark Contacted, Schedule Walkthrough, Mark Converted, Archive / Restore.
• The Route Fit card is on the mobile lead page too — ranked route options, the suggested per-visit rate with "See the math", and the buttons Convert &amp; Schedule and Adjust in full form (the older Add Customer form with the lead prefilled, which does not create the job or the route stop). Converting on the phone creates the customer, service location, job, and route stop in one confirm, exactly as on the web.
• Schedule Walkthrough on mobile is a simple picker: choose a technician and a date, and a card shows which route it lands on. If that technician has no route that day, the walkthrough goes to the open pool instead.
• New Lead — in the same Sales group, above the Leads row, "New business? Start here — see route fit and pricing" opens the Add Lead form in one tap. The "+" button on the leads list opens the same form.
• On that form the Address field is a button ("Search for an address") that opens a full-screen search: type to pick a suggestion, choose one of your last five Recent addresses, or tap Use my current location for someone who flags a technician down at a house. Current location drops you on a Confirm the address map — "Move the map to adjust the pin" — because GPS can land on the curb or next door. Creating the lead with a pinned address opens its page with Route Fit already worked out.

Frequently asked questions

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