Field service management software for quotes, invoices and scheduling

What Software Do I Need?

The type of software you’re looking for is called Field Service Management Software (FSM).

There’s a diverse market, with a range of features and price points. But unlike ‘spreadsheet’ or ‘word processor’, ‘field service management’ has not really entered the language of many small businesses yet.

So if you’ve been struggling to find how to ask Google for the right thing, you’re not alone!

This makes it hard for businesses in construction, property maintenance, cleaning etc to find the software that would help them to digitally transform themselves.

Which means that many are still using either spreadsheets or paper-based methods to track and schedule work, write quotes and send out invoices.

The field service management market is not yet mature and it’s important to find a piece of software that works for your business. With different offerings focussed on best serving different parts of the end to end process.

We expect over time that through either development or acquisition these differences will level ou. But right now you will most likely need to make trade-offs in terms of where your biggest pain points are.

Benefits of Field Service Management

There are a number of benefits of field service management software in businesses that send workers out to sites to undertake their work

The most obvious of these is…

Capacity

If your field workers (engineers, builders, carpenters, cleaners etc) are getting close to maximum capacity you could hire one more. But if your business can’t afford to bring on extra admin staff to support that then you need to find a way to create more capacity in your processes. This is where field service management software can be a game-changer.

Once the initial bedding-in period is passed, we’ve seen clients save up to 30% of their office staff time by switching to a field service management tool. Allowing them to grow revenue much faster than costs.

The next important factor is…

Efficiency

With a field service management system in place you can typically schedule your work more intelligently. Leading to less travel time between jobs. Obviously, the impact of this will vary depending on the type of work your business undertakes. If you’re usually on a site for one or more full days then there’s little to be gained here. But if you have staff who undertake several jobs in a day then this can make an enormous difference to the amount of time lost to travel.

Giving your office team a simple view of where everyone is supposed to be, and when, can be very powerful.

Finally, there’s what we like to call…

Waste

This includes the amount of time you’re paying staff not to be either working or travelling to a job. But also the time and materials used on jobs that don’t get accurately tracked and are therefore not properly billed.

When you invoice a customer incorrectly there are two options, either you over-charge or you under-charge.

In the event of an over-charge most customers are going to query and correct it. In the case of under-charging, or worse – not invoicing at all, how many customers are going to chase you to bill them more? Of course some will, but many won’t.

We’ve seen businesses that have discovered they were missing almost 10% of their invoice values due to missing line items, unreadable/damaged paper records, or simply not having automated processes in place to make sure invoices were issued.

Think about that for a moment – 10% of all the work undertaken and the materials used never charged for. The impact on their profitability of a system that allows this to be tracked and automatically billed for has been large and immediate. The return on investment for setting up the software achieved within just days.

That may be an extreme case, but can you be sure your business never misses an item from billing? And even if you think you can, how much time and effort is that taking for you to stay on top of? When that time could be used doing revenue-generating work for customers instead?

What features do I need?

Depending on the scale of your business and what tools you already have, you may need some or all of these components in your field service management software:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We’ve talked about the importance of this elsewhere. But every business should have a single place to hold lead and customer details. And there are a wide number of platforms available to do this.

You may already have on in place in your business, in which case you’ll want to know whether it integrates with your field service management software. But if not, the best field service management platforms can provide this capability for you. Allowing you to simplify the number of systems your business uses, saving both cost and effort.

Work Requests

The ability for your customers to request you undertake work and book it directly via your website. This may seem scary at first, but most of these tools allow customers to indicate when they’d like you to do the work and allow your admin staff to book the appointment for the job. Allowing your customers to use another channel to book work in makes it easier for them to use you, especially for repeat jobs.

Quoting

For many businesses, there is a need to produce a quote before undertaking work. Depending on the complexity of your quote process, you may be able to do all or some of it directly in the field service management tool. Potentially also allowing customers to electronically sign it there and then. Reducing friction for the sale and lowering the chances of a dispute later.

Of course for businesses selling low volume, high-value services it may still be necessary to produce each quote in a bespoke manner. But challenge yourself on whether that’s really necessary because standardising a process will allow you to scale.

Work Scheduling

A key requirement for this software usually involves helping to schedule and track the work itself. Depending on whether your staff are visiting multiple sites each day or one site for multiple days, this may be more or less complex. Done right, this can also allow you to automatically remind your customers of an upcoming visit. Reducing the chances of access and similar problems.

A field service management tool should also allow workers who are on-site to make any amendments to the work undertaken. Such as additional parts needed directly in the job, ensuring they don’t get forgotten about.

You may also want to track staff time on a job and have the ability to bulk reassign work in the event of absence. Both of these features are available in some field service management software.

Inventory Management

A more advanced feature, and less common, is the ability to track inventory. Some packages allow you to track inventory down to individual van level. And if your business requires a high volume of parts or spares, this may be an important feature for you.

Be aware though that with only a few field service management packages currently supporting this, it may mean you have to make compromises elsewhere to get it.

We’re expecting to see more field service management software offering this feature over the next few years so it’s something worth thinking about.

Invoicing

Ultimately you do the work to get paid – so invoicing is an important part of any business. You may already be using your accounting software to generate invoices. But it’s worth looking into whether field service management software can help in this area.

By integrating your invoicing into the same end to end process as the quoting and job scheduling you have a single item of work that has all relevant information attached to it. This means that by generating an invoice directly from it you know you’re billing for what the field worker used, and nothing gets lost.

If you’re using a modern cloud accounting package like Quickbooks or Xero, you’ll find that many field service management tools integrate with it. Meaning that they can generate the invoice and automatically update your accounting system. This potentially removes a repetitive manual task from your business.

Be aware of your requirements on invoicing from the start, however. Since not all field service management packages talk to all accounting ones. So you’ll want to pick one that works with what you’ve got. Or if you plan to introduce one, plan ahead and get a pairing that works.

Sadly, older standalone accounting software often does not support modern connectivity standards and so will not integrate with most field service management tools. In this case, you will need to think carefully about your processes for doing invoice production. However, at least the information is on a system, not a scrap of paper in someone’s van!

Getting Paid

Most field service management software also integrate with popular online payment tools such as Stripe, Paypal or GoCardless (either directly or via your accounting platform). Allowing you to provide an electronic invoice with a “Pay Now” button. Streamlining the collection of payments from your customers.

Reporting

Introducing field service management software is an opportunity to improve the reporting you undertake on your business. Many have some reporting element built-in.

Some also allow you to link up sophisticated dashboard tools (like Microsoft Power BI and Google Data Studio) to allow you to get a great view of your business.

Reporting set-up is a whole topic in itself and it’s important you take advice on what metrics to track and how to do that.

Follow-ups

Finally, after you’ve done the job you may wish to ask customers for a review of the work, schedule in a servicing visit or offer them some sort of care plan. Many field service management systems either provide some of these options out of the box, or integrate with specific platforms to do it.

If you have these requirements then think about your existing tooling and whether you want to change or keep it, since that may restrict your choices.

Hopefully you’ve found this guide useful in terms of laying out the things to think about with Field Service Management software.

We will be publishing more information on individual tools but for now some examples you should look at include:

Jobber
Quotient
Buildertrend

If you need help and advice on selecting a tool, book a free consultation session with us and we will be happy to help.