Enquiry Form Questions for Trades: The 8 Fields That Work

An enquiry form for trades needs eight fields to price a job without a phone call: what the job is (a picklist, not free text), where it is (a full address, not a postcode), property type and rough age, access, photos, timing (emergency, this week, planning ahead), name plus mobile plus email, and one free-text box at the end. Everything else you think you need — budget, how they heard about you, preferred contact method, a company field on a domestic form — is either something you can look up yourself or something that makes people close the tab. The rule is simple: a field earns its place only if the answer changes the price, the date, or the van you send.

Most trades sites still run a form from 2012: name, email, message, send. That form does not qualify anyone. It moves the qualifying phone call to a worse time, when you are up a ladder with your phone in your pocket. A modern embedded form does the qualifying in the form, then drops the answers into your system as a job you can price. This piece is the field list, trade by trade, plus the fields that quietly cost you work.

Why enquiry form questions for trades are different

An online shop's form takes an order. A trades form takes a guess and turns it into something you can quote. The customer does not know the vocabulary. They type "electrics not working upstairs" and expect you to know the rest. So the form has to ask the questions you would ask on the phone, in the same order, in plain language, with the answers pre-written so they only have to tap.

That difference gives you three design rules:

• Picklists over prose. A tap is free. Typing is a tax. Offer eight job types and most people find theirs in two seconds. Offer an empty box and you get "hi, need a quote please".
• Ask the price-driving question early and the contact details last. People answer questions about their problem happily. They hesitate at the phone number. Put the hesitation after they have already invested three taps.
• Every field needs a reader. If nobody downstream uses it — not you, not the quote, not the planner — delete it. Unread fields are pure abandonment risk.

The eight fields that let you price without a call

Eight fields, six of them taps. That is a sub-two-minute form on a phone, and it gives you enough to send a real price, or a confident "we need to look at this one first, here is when".

Field lists by job type

The eight above are the spine. What makes a form genuinely quotable is the two or three trade-specific questions that appear after the job type is chosen. Conditional logic means nobody ever sees a question that does not apply to them.

Electrician

• Consumer unit or fuse board: a photo with the cover on, and the make if it is visible
• Is there earth-leakage protection (RCD) already, or don't you know? "Don't know" must be a valid option
• Number of new points or circuits, if it is an addition
• EV chargers: metres from board to parking space, and whether the run is indoors, outdoors, or through a wall
• Faults: does it trip straight away, or only when something is switched on?

Plumber and heating

• Boiler or heat source: make, model, rough age. A photo of the data plate beats all three
• Is water escaping right now? If yes, the form should show your phone number and stop asking questions
• Bathroom work: like-for-like swap, or is anything moving position?
• Is the pipework accessible, or tiled and boxed in?

Roofer

• Storeys, and roof type: tile, slate, felt, metal
• A photo from ground level, plus one of the internal damage if there is any
• Is scaffolding already up, or is there room for it?
• Is this an insurance claim? That one yes/no changes your whole paperwork trail

Painter and decorator

• Number of rooms and rough ceiling height
• Walls only, or woodwork and ceilings too?
• Current condition: sound, patchy, wallpaper to strip, damp present
• Occupied or empty while you work?

Locksmith and emergency callout

Different rules apply. An emergency form gets three fields: what has happened, address, mobile. Nothing else. Someone locked out at 11pm will not photograph the cylinder, and asking them to is the fastest way to lose the job to whoever answers the phone first.

Photos: the field that saves the survey

If you add one field this month, make it photo upload. A picture of the fuse board, the boiler data plate or the leaking joint replaces the guessing that otherwise forces a site visit. Two practical points:

• Tell them what to shoot. "Upload photos" gets you a blurry ceiling. "A photo of your fuse box with the cover on, and one of the room with the problem" gets you something usable. Put the instruction in the label, not in a tooltip nobody opens.
• Optional, but prominent. Required uploads lose people on desktop, where they are not standing next to the boiler. Make it optional and add one line: photos usually mean we can price without visiting. Most people would rather send a photo than take a morning off work.

Address: you are pricing travel, not just the work

A postcode or a town name is not enough. You need the full address because three numbers come out of it: drive time from your usual patch, whether the job sits inside the area you want to serve, and parking. A two-hour round trip on a one-hour job is a loss you can only see if the form asks where the job is before you commit to it.

Use address autocomplete so it is one interaction rather than five fields. Add a separate flat or door number field. In apartment blocks that is the difference between arriving and arriving somewhere.

The tax-relief question

In Sweden the ROT deduction cuts the customer's share of the labour cost on work at a private home by 30%, with an annual per-person ceiling shared with RUT. Amounts and rules change, so check the current figures at skatteverket.se. Green-tech work such as solar, battery storage and EV charge points runs as its own separate scheme with its own rate.

Why it belongs on the form: the deduction changes the number the customer sees. A quote showing the gross price when the customer expects the net price loses to the firm that shows the net price. The claim also needs identity and property details that are painful to chase later. So the form asks one thing at enquiry stage — is this a private home, and would you like us to apply the deduction? — and nothing more. Identity numbers and property designations belong at signing, not in a public web form.

Outside Sweden, the same principle applies to whatever scheme is live in your market: reduced VAT on certain domestic energy work, grant schemes for heat pumps or insulation, or the plain question of whether the customer is a VAT-registered business or a private household. One question, yes/no depth. It changes the price, so it earns its place. Confirm the current rules with your own tax authority before you print a rate anywhere.

The fields that make people quit

Every field is a small ask. Some are worse than others:

• Budget. The customer does not know, and if they do, telling you feels like a trap. You are the one who is supposed to know the price.
• "How did you hear about us?" Your analytics already know. This field serves your curiosity and costs you jobs.
• Company name on a domestic form. Small friction, no value, and it makes a homeowner wonder whether they are on the right form.
• Preferred contact method. You will phone them anyway.
• A required message box. See below.
• Consent checkboxes stacked three deep. One clear line about what you do with the details, linked to your privacy page. GDPR asks for a lawful basis and clear information, not a wall of boxes.
• A CAPTCHA before submit. Use an invisible bot check or a honeypot field instead. Making a paying customer identify traffic lights to reach you is a poor trade.

Why free text alone is a time thief

The name/email/message form feels considerate. It is the most expensive form you can run, because it moves all the work to you and does it slowly.

Count what one free-text enquiry costs. "Hi, need a quote for some electrics." You reply asking what and where. They answer a day later, partially. You phone, no answer. They ring back while you are in a loft. On day three you learn it is a full rewire in a 1962 house 90 minutes away that you would have priced differently, or declined, on day one. Four touches, three days, and still no quote sent.

The same enquiry through a structured form arrives complete on day one and can be priced or declined in four minutes. Free text is not the enemy. Free text as the only input is. Keep the box, put it last, make it optional, and label it "anything else we should know" so it collects the exception rather than the whole story.

What happens after submit

A structured form is only worth building if the answers land somewhere useful. If your form emails you a summary that you then retype into a quote, you have automated the wrong half. The enquiry should arrive as a job record: customer created, address on the map, job type set, photos attached, ready to price, ready to drag onto the planner if you take it.

That is what OdinTask's embeddable form builder is for. You build the field list, embed it on your site, and submissions land as enquiries in the same system that produces the quote — with the ROT deduction calculated in it — plus the e-signature, the work order and the invoice. One thread, no retyping. If you use something else, apply the same test to it: does the answer to field six ever get keyed in twice?

Build it this week

1. Open your current form. Count the fields. Delete anything nobody downstream reads.
2. Turn "what do you need" from a text box into a picklist of your six to ten actual services.
3. Add address autocomplete, timing, access and photo upload.
4. Add two or three conditional questions behind each job type, using the lists above.
5. Add the tax-relief yes/no if you work in private homes.
6. Move the free-text box to the bottom and make it optional.
7. Fill it in yourself, on your own phone, standing up, one-handed. If it takes more than two minutes, cut a field.

Do that and the phone stops being your qualification tool. The form qualifies, you quote. If you want the form and everything after it in one place, start a free trial or see what is included on the pricing page.