Trades and field service
A plumber does not have opportunities. They have quotes.
Trades is the best-served category in Australian business software, and it is still the one where we see the most spreadsheets sitting beside the system. Not because the products are bad. Because a job on a calendar is only about seventy per cent of how a trade business actually runs.
The other thirty per cent is where the money goes. Prefab and staging. Service contracts. Hire equipment. Compliance certificates. Which van has the part on it. Every trade we have talked to keeps at least one of those in Excel.
The honest position
If ServiceM8 or Tradify fits your business, use it.
We are not going to pretend a $29 a month product is a rip-off. For a two-van operation running fifty jobs a month, ServiceM8 is very good value and a custom build would be a waste of your money. We would tell you that on the call.
The conversation changes at two points. The first is price: per-user products tax every hire, and volume-priced products charge you more in a good month. The second is shape: the day your business does something the product has no field for, and the spreadsheet appears.
We have written the five-year sums for the five products trades actually compare, with each vendor’s own published pricing and the date we read it: ServiceM8, Tradify, Fergus, Simpro and AroFlo. Two of those five will not tell you the price at all.
The vocabulary
Your words, on every screen, from day one.
A generic CRM asks about Deals and Opportunities and Accounts. A trades product asks about Jobs and Clients, which is closer, and then still asks about things nobody in your business says out loud.
A build starts from a list of the words your business already uses. Jobs, sites, vans, certs, callouts, defects, variations, whatever they are. Nobody learns a translation layer before they can be useful, and the apprentice who started Monday is not stuck asking what a forecast category is.
The scope
What gets built, and what we leave alone.
What we build for a trade
The parts that are the same everywhere, done properly, plus the parts nobody else has a field for.
- Jobs and quotes with your stages, not a generic pipeline
- A scheduling board your office manager would design if anyone asked, including who and which vehicle
- Sites and assets, so the history follows the address rather than the customer name
- Compliance certificates generated from job data instead of retyped into a PDF
- Timesheets for everyone, with no per-timesheet-user charge
- Materials and variations on the job, so the margin is visible before the invoice
- Recurring service contracts that generate their own work
- Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks sync, because rebuilding accounting would be daft
- Phone-first field screens, because that is where the work happens
What we will not build
- Payroll or award interpretation. Modern awards change, penalty rates are a legal minefield, and getting it wrong is somebody's underpayment claim
- Accounting or BAS lodgement. Xero and MYOB already do this and are certified for it
- Full project accounting for large commercial contractors. That is real Simpro territory and we will say so rather than take the job
The rule we apply. If the thing is regulated, certified or changes by legislation, it stays with the specialist product and we integrate. Everything that is specific to how your business runs is exactly what a build is for.
The sum
Your software bill, times sixty.
Do it on your own number
Count the subscription, the extra seats, the SMS and the card processing. On a busy trade business the card processing is often larger than the subscription itself.
Common questions
Answered plainly.
Is a custom system worth it for a small trade business?
Usually not, and we will say so. Under about $150 a month in software costs, ServiceM8 or Tradify is better value than anything we could build. The sums start working when the bill passes roughly $750 a month, or when your team is losing hours a week to a spreadsheet the software cannot absorb.
How long does a trades build take?
Six to ten weeks for most trade businesses. Two of those weeks are mapping how the work actually moves, which is the part that decides whether the rest is any good.
Will it work on a phone in a roof cavity with no signal?
It works on a phone. Offline capture for the field is a real requirement we scope explicitly rather than assume, because how much offline you actually need varies enormously between a plumber in Ryde and a solar installer three hours from a tower.
Can it do compliance certificates?
Yes, and this is one of the clearest wins. The data is already in the job, so the certificate is generated rather than retyped, and it is stored against the site rather than in somebody's email. What we do not do is guarantee your compliance obligations, which are yours.
What about payroll and awards?
We do not build it. Award interpretation changes by legislation and getting it wrong is an underpayment claim, so it stays with a specialist payroll product and we send it the timesheet data.
Can you migrate our job history off ServiceM8 or Tradify?
Yes. Clients, sites, jobs and invoices come across. It is included from Premium upward and it is usually the point at which a business discovers how much of its real process was living outside the software.
Where to next
Bring your worst spreadsheet.
The one beside the job software. That spreadsheet is the entire brief, and twenty minutes on a call with it open usually tells us whether a build is worth your money.