IndustriesTrades & field service
The crew is on the road, the office computer has never been backed up, and the 9pm call went to someone else.
Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, landscaping. The business runs from phones, the quotes come from the truck, and the one computer in the office holds the books. The IT is small, and it matters more than anyone admits until the day it stops.
What breaks
What breaks in a business run from a truck.
The phone is the office
The job app, the photos, the invoices, the customer's number and the signed quote all live on a phone. A lost or dead phone is a lost week, unless the accounts and the photos are somewhere else too.
The office computer has never been backed up
It runs the accounting software and the customer list, it is six years old, and nobody has thought about it since it was bought. When it dies, the books die with it.
After-hours enquiries go to whoever answers first
A furnace fails at 9pm on a Friday. The customer calls three companies. The one that answers and books the visit gets the job. Voicemail does not.
Quoting and scheduling happen from the road on bad data
The dispatcher and the crew are looking at different versions of the day. A job gets double-booked, a quote goes out without the parts price, and the customer notices before you do.
Everyone shares the same login
The whole crew uses one Jobber password and one email. The technician who left last month still has both. The office would not know if they used them.
The software you run
We look after what it runs on.
Job management on phones, accounting on one PC, and a website that ought to be booking work. We keep the phones enrolled, the office computer backed up, the accounts separated, and the enquiries answered.
The vendor supports the application. We manage the machines, accounts, network and backups it depends on, and we make the call to the vendor so you do not have to.
- Job management
- Jobber, ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or FieldEdge, on every crew phone and the dispatcher's screen
- Accounting
- QuickBooks Online or Sage 50 on the office computer, synced from the job app so invoices are entered once
- Photos and documentation
- CompanyCam or the job app's photo feature, backed up off the phone the same day
- Email and files
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, one account per person, MFA on each, and a shared drive that is not somebody's desktop
- Enquiries
- The phone number, the website chat and the text line, answered by an AI agent trained on your services when nobody else can
- Larger contractors
- Procore or similar for commercial work, and the security questionnaires that come with commercial clients
Software commonly used in Trades & field service.
A scenario, not a case study
A six-truck HVAC company on a Friday night in January.
Suppose a Calgary HVAC company with six technicians, one dispatcher, an owner who still does the quotes, and an office computer bought in 2019.
This is an illustration of how the service works in a business like yours. It does not describe a client.
- Friday 9:14pm
A homeowner's furnace stops. She calls the number on the truck she saw last week. The AI agent answers, asks the questions the dispatcher would, confirms the address is in the service area, and books the first emergency slot on Saturday morning. The on-call technician gets the details by text.
- Saturday 8:00am
The technician opens the job in Jobber on his phone: address, problem, photos she sent, and the note that she has a newborn in the house. He is there by 8:40.
- Monday 7:30am
The office computer will not start. Its drive has failed. The accounting file and the customer list were backed up continuously; we restore them to a replacement machine the same morning, and the books are open by 11.
- Monday 4:00pm
A technician who left last month is offboarded properly: his Jobber login, his email and the shared drive, in one ticket. Each remaining technician gets their own login with MFA, so the next departure is one account, not everyone's password.
- Wednesday
The owner reviews the agent's transcripts for the week. Nine after-hours enquiries, six booked, two handed to a person because they were outside the service area, one asked for a quote the estimator will do in person.
- Month end
The monthly report shows the office restore, the offboarding, the phones enrolled, and how many enquiries arrived after 6pm.
What we would put in place
What we would put in place for a trade.
Answer the phone, back up the office, give everyone their own login. Most of the value for a trades business is in those three, and none of them are expensive.
AI chat & booking
The 9pm enquiry answered, qualified and booked into your job app while the crew is at dinner. Built for trades.
Read about ai chat & bookingBackup & recovery
The office computer and the accounting file backed up continuously, so a dead drive is a Monday morning, not a lost business.
Read about backup & recoveryCloud & Microsoft 365
One account per person, MFA on each, and photos and files off the phones and into a shared drive the office can reach.
Read about cloud & microsoft 365IT support
Phones enrolled and replaced, the office kept running, and leavers offboarded the same hour without changing everyone's password.
Read about it supportCybersecurity
MFA on the job app and email, and the basics a commercial client's security questionnaire will ask about.
Read about cybersecurityWeb development
A site that loads on a phone and books the job, from $2,000, instead of one that sends people to voicemail.
Read about web development
The package we usually recommend
Essential
- per user, per month
- from $75–95
Essential covers the help desk, monitoring, email security, Microsoft 365 backup and basic MFA that a crew-based business needs, priced per login rather than per truck. Companies taking on commercial contracts that ask security questions usually move to Professional.
Final pricing depends on environment complexity, compliance requirements and support scope, and is confirmed after the IT audit.
Fair questions
What trades & field service businesses ask us.
- We are too small for managed IT.
- Essential is priced per person with a login, and a trades business usually has fewer of those than it thinks. The office computer alone is reason enough; ask anyone who has lost theirs.
- Our guys are not computer people.
- They do not need to be. Their phone is enrolled once, the job app is on it, and the help desk is a number they can call from the truck when something will not open.
- We use Jobber. Is that not our IT?
- Jobber runs your jobs. It does not back up the office computer, manage the phones, separate the logins or answer the phone at 9pm. Those are the gaps a trade actually falls into.
- What would the AI agent cost us?
- It starts with a free readiness assessment that counts how many enquiries you are missing today. You see that number and a fixed price before deciding anything.
Book a free IT audit.
No obligation and no pitch deck. We look at what you have, tell you what is wrong with it, and you decide what to do with that.
- A full inventory of your devices, accounts and licences
- A written list of the security gaps we find
- What your current setup is costing you against a flat per-user rate
Prefer to talk? Get in touch