Field Service Scheduling Software: Off-the-Shelf or Custom

We build custom software, and we still tell most callers to try a subscription first. This guide is how to tell which side of that line your company is on before you spend money on either.

What off-the-shelf field service apps do well

A good subscription app covers the standard path from a call to a paid invoice, and it covers it well:

• A schedule board the office drags jobs onto, with each tech’s day on their phone.
• Dispatch basics: job addresses, directions and status updates as crews start and finish.
• Photos and signatures attached to the job record.
• Quotes and invoices, often with a link to your accounting package.
• Someone else’s problem: hosting, security updates, and the phone apps for both iPhone and Android.

You can start next week, the monthly price is known, and if it doesn’t work out you cancel. For a shop whose jobs look like the ones in the vendor’s demo, that is hard to beat.

Test it properly before you sign. Run a month of your real jobs through the trial, including the awkward ones, and have two of your crew use it in the truck rather than at a desk.

Where they break: per-seat costs and rigid job types

The trouble shows up in two places, and usually a year or two in.

Per-seat fees grow with the company

Most of these apps charge per user per month, and the office staff count as users too. Each new hire raises the bill, and seasonal crews raise it again, whether or not those people use half the features. Before you choose, multiply the per-user price by your headcount, add the office, and multiply by five years. Then do the same with the headcount you plan to have. That number, not the first month’s price, is what you compare a build against.

Your jobs don’t match their job types

Most field crew dispatch software assumes one tech, one job, one visit. Real work breaks that in predictable ways:

• Recurring contract work, where the same site gets the same service on a schedule and the contract matters more than the visit.
• Jobs that run over several days with a different crew on each one.
• Photo standards that differ by job type, where the office needs proof of specific steps rather than a few snapshots.
• Time rules the app never planned for, like the union reporting Force Electric has to satisfy across several states.
• Reports the office already relies on, in a format the app won’t produce.

When that happens, crews start keeping notes on paper beside the app, the office retypes them, and you are paying a monthly fee for a system that holds half the job.

What a custom job-tracking app costs

We don’t publish a price for a custom field service app, because the scope sets it. What decides it:

• The screens. A schedule board, a job form and photo capture are the core. Each extra job type, form or report adds to it.
• Working with no signal. If crews work in basements or rural areas, the app has to save offline and sync later, which is more work than an app that assumes a connection.
• Connections. Pushing hours to payroll or invoices to accounting so nobody types them twice.
• What comes across. Customer lists, contracts and job history from the spreadsheets or app you use now.
• Keeping it running. Hosting, backups and changes after launch are an ongoing cost, just as a subscription is.

The price comes as a fixed quote in writing after a free audit. On the other side of the ledger, you own the system, the data and the documentation, and there is no per-seat fee when you hire.

There is a middle route for contractors. HMR Plumbing runs FalconSnap, the job tracking app for contractors we built, which puts the schedule, job photos and status updates on phones and desktops. Force Electric uses the same system with custom programming for its union time tracking. That costs less than a build from scratch and fits better than a generic app.

For more on how we build for crews in the field, see custom software for mobile workforce companies. The phones, tablets and office network the app runs on are covered by IT support for field service teams.

Case study: The Proz and JobTrax

The Proz cleans commercial kitchen hoods from Parkersburg, West Virginia. Their crews document every job with photos on site, and the general manager needed those photos at the office the same day, plus a scheduler to drag jobs onto. The system they had could store the photos, but not share them in real time.

We built JobTrax, a custom field service app with a desktop and mobile side:

• A job scheduler: upcoming jobs queue up for the general manager, who drags them onto the week calendar and loads each truck with its assignments.
• Customer records with contracts, routine jobs and communications.
• On-site accountability: photos taken in the mobile app load into the web app as the crew takes them and turn into reports.

We have worked with The Proz for more than eight years, building and improving the same system, and The Proz has grown into the leading hood cleaning service in its area. Read the JobTrax case study, or see all our case studies.

Getting crews to use it without a fight

JobTrax worked because the photos crews took on site became the report the office used to ask for, so nobody wrote the job up twice. It also changed in rounds. Each version went out, the crew and the office said what got in the way, and the next version fixed it.

That is the short form. Our post on getting field crews off paper covers how to roll a new app out in the order that builds trust.