The boundary rule
A job is a commitment to perform. That is the whole test. If nobody has agreed to pay for a defined scope, there is nothing to produce, schedule or staff — so there should be no job.
Businesses break this rule for a reasonable-sounding reason: they want the work visible. But visibility of possible work belongs to the estimate pipeline, not to the production board. Mixing them means your production board can never be trusted as a workload figure, and nobody can answer 'what are we actually committed to?' without filtering by hand.
The three inputs that legitimately create a job
- An accepted estimate — the customer agreed to the scope and price in writing.
- An executed contract — every required signer completed and the agreement is final.
- A direct sale with no prior estimate — recurring maintenance, a warranty return, or an emergency call where the scope and price were agreed on the spot and recorded.
What conversion should carry
- The customer record — never a duplicate created at conversion time.
- The sold scope, line items and total, as agreed rather than as re-typed.
- The service address and access details.
- The signed agreement and any attachments, linked rather than copied.
- The payment schedule or deposit terms that billing will later draw on.
What happens to work that does not become a job
An unsold estimate is not a dead record and it is not a new lead. It enters estimate follow-up, owned by the person who ran it, with a scheduled next contact. Sending it back to the top of the lead funnel destroys the history and restarts a conversation the customer already had.
Handled properly, that pool is usually the cheapest revenue in the business, because the qualification and site visit are already paid for.
Recording the moment
The conversion timestamp is your sold date. It is what close rate, sales cycle length and revenue-by-period should be measured from — not the invoice date, which drifts, and not the appointment date, which predates the decision.