Agents Subs matched, paid, and scored without the spreadsheet
It is 4:15 p.m. on a Friday and the operations manager at a sub-heavy roofing shop is staring at the spreadsheet that runs her whole week — three sold jobs, nine sub crews, and no honest answer to which crew should get which roof, or what the last crew is actually owed.
Source: ServiceTitan, "Pantheon 2026: Live coverage from ServiceTitan" — https://www.servicetitan.com/blog/pantheon-2026-live-coverage — the coverage describes planned agent work for roofing and sub-heavy shops, matching sold work to subcontractor crews and handling their pay and performance in the same system. This post broadens that planned agent into a buildable workflow for any sub-heavy trade; it is not a shipped product claim, and no vendor figures are used.
The problem
Sub work runs on memory and a spreadsheet. The manager knows which crew is fast, which photographs everything, and which generates callbacks — but that knowledge lives in her head and in text threads. When she is out, assignments become whoever answers first.
Pay is the other half of the mess. Each crew is paid on completed scope, scope changes in the field, and the arithmetic gets rebuilt by hand every Friday from photos, notes and memory. One wrong square count or missed extra becomes an argument, and the argument costs more than the money.
How the agent workflow works
- A sold job becomes a matchable unit of work. When a job sells, the agent reads its trade, location, size and start window, then ranks the available sub crews against it — right trade, working area, open capacity, and the crew’s running score.
- The work order goes out complete. The matched crew receives the scope, address, materials notes and the photo checklist the job must come back with. Acceptance is recorded, not assumed from a read receipt.
- Completion is checked against the order, not a phone call. As the crew uploads photos and closes the job, the agent compares what was documented against what was ordered and flags missing scope or missing photos before pay is calculated.
- Pay is calculated from the completed scope. The agent applies the crew’s agreed rates to the verified quantities and extras, and produces a pay sheet the manager approves — the crew sees the same numbers the office sees.
- Every job updates the crew’s score. Callbacks, on-time starts, and photo completeness roll into a running score per crew, so the next match is based on the record, not on who complained loudest last week.
What you need to set it up
- A single sub roster with the facts matching actually needs: trades, service area, capacity, agreed pay rates and insurance status — kept current, because the agent matches from it literally.
- A fixed completion standard per job type: the photos and checks a crew must return before a job counts as done and payable.
- Agreed pay rules written down — rates, how extras are approved, and what a callback does to pay — before any calculation is automated.
- Honest costing: the source publishes no price for this planned agent. Expect the cost to sit inside the operations platform you already pay for, plus manager time to clean the roster and check the first pay sheets by hand.
Where it breaks
A score is not the whole crew. A low score can mean bad work — or a run of difficult jobs, bad weather weeks, or a checklist the crew was never trained on. Fire a crew off a number alone and you can cut your best crew for the hardest work. The score starts the conversation; it does not end it.
Matching is only as honest as the roster. Stale availability, an expired certificate, or a rate that was renegotiated by phone and never typed in — the agent will match and pay confidently from all of it. The roster needs one owner, or it decays in a month.
Scope disputes do not automate away. When a crew says rot doubled the work and the photos are ambiguous, no calculation settles it. A person still walks that job, and the pay sheet still needs a human approval before money moves.
The bottom line
Run this if subs do most of your production and one spreadsheet does most of your managing. Match from a record instead of memory, pay from verified scope instead of Friday arithmetic, and let every finished job make the next assignment smarter.