When it hits 100° and the phone will not stop, the difference between a good August and a wrecked one is how many calls you can actually take, how fast the second truck gets the part, and whether anybody remembered to sell the maintenance agreement. ServiceBuilt is built for the days when there is no time to fight the software.
No contracts. Ever. Month to month, cancel yourself in the app. No card to start, no demo call, no salesperson.
Every HVAC shop runs two businesses. One is a call centre in July. The other is a sales organisation in October. Most software is designed for one of them.
A map, drag-to-schedule, and one active job per technician so nobody quietly holds three tickets open. When you are running eight calls a truck, the board has to be readable at a glance from a phone in a driveway.
Diagnose today, order the part, come back Thursday. The return trip carries the original diagnosis, the photos and the customer history, so the tech who comes back is not starting from a text message and a memory.
Tech Schedule shows who is loaded and who is not, before you promise a homeowner a window you cannot hit. In August that is the whole job.
Riley picks up when the office is buried, gets the address and the problem, and books the call into the same board. Missed calls in July are the most expensive thing in this trade.
A shop with 400 agreements has a spring and a fall already on the calendar. A shop with none starts every March at zero. The difference is not effort — it is whether the renewals chase themselves.
Members holds the plan, the price, the billing interval, when it renews, and how many of the included visits the customer has actually used. So a tech standing in a garage knows whether this one is covered before he quotes it.
A dedicated Follow Up tab lists agreements about to lapse instead of leaving them to be discovered next spring when the customer calls somebody else.
The spring AC check and the fall heat check get scheduled as recurring work, so the shoulder seasons fill from your own book rather than from ads.
A technician can put the agreement on the invoice at the kitchen table. Price book options are good, better and best, so the plan sits next to the repair instead of being a separate conversation nobody has.
Changeouts are where the margin lives, and where most shops leak it — in the gap between the tech who found the cracked heat exchanger and the person who is supposed to follow up.
| What happens on the job | What the software does about it |
|---|---|
| Tech condemns a 19-year-old unit on a no-heat call | Estimate built on the truck from the price book, with good, better and best tiers priced the way you set them. |
| Homeowner wants to think about it | Estimate goes out by text and sits in Unsold Estimates. Automatic follow-ups fire at 24 hours, 48, 72 and a week — not whenever somebody remembers. |
| They approve on Sunday night | Approval by text, timestamped. It lands in Sold Estimates, and you know the job is real before Monday. |
| Equipment has to come from the supply house | Install Board tracks it: not ordered, ordered, arrived. Nobody schedules a crew for a unit sitting on a truck in Memphis. |
| Install crew is out three days | Photos and signature captured on a form at completion, so the file is closed properly the first time. |
| Tech gets paid on it | Commission runs on gross profit, not revenue — the equipment cost comes out before the percentage does. |
Paying a percentage of revenue on a changeout with a $4,200 condenser in it is how shops pay out more than they made. ServiceBuilt was built by someone who did that once.
Material cost comes off before the percentage. Set the basis once and payroll uses it every week.
Per job: what came in, what the parts cost, what the labour cost, what was left. Sorted by whatever is bleeding.
Calls are tracked to their source, so you can tell whether the LSA spend or the mailer produced the changeout — before you renew either.
Hourly, commission, or a base plus a percentage, with timesheets behind it and a weekly per-tech breakdown.
ServiceBuilt was written by a contractor for his own crew, and the trade was garage doors. It does not do refrigerant tracking, EPA 608 logging, load calculations or AHRI match lookup, and anybody who tells you their software does all of that and everything else is selling you a roadmap.
Because the six things that actually run a service company are identical in both trades: a call comes in, somebody gets dispatched, an estimate gets approved, an invoice gets paid, a technician gets paid on it, and somebody follows up. Your job types, price book, agreement plans and commission rules are all yours to configure, and the migration brings your own history with them.
Yes, and it is the part of the app an HVAC shop will lean on hardest. Members holds each plan with its price, billing interval, renewal date and how many included visits the customer has used. Recurring Service Events put the spring and fall visits on the calendar, and a dedicated Follow Up tab lists agreements about to expire so they get renewed on purpose rather than by luck.
Straight answer: it was built in a garage door company and it is still run there every day. What that buys you is that the dispatch, estimating, payroll and follow-up were designed by someone who was losing money without them, not by a product team.
What it does not buy you is HVAC-specific machinery. There is no refrigerant log, no load calc, no AHRI lookup. If those are the reason you are shopping, buy the thing that has them. If you are shopping because dispatch is a group text and nobody knows which estimates never got followed up, that is the same problem in every trade and it is the one this solves.
It does not change. Both plans are flat and include unlimited technicians, so adding four people in June and losing them in September has no effect on your bill. That is the opposite of per-seat pricing, where your worst month for cash is also your biggest software invoice.
No. You connect your own Square account and pay whatever rate you have with Square. We add nothing, we are not the merchant of record, and deposits go from Square to your bank on your existing schedule without passing through us.
Yes. Tap to Pay on iPhone runs through the Square Point of Sale app on the same phone, so there is no dongle to buy and nothing to lose out of a truck. The technician needs the free Square app installed; after that the money lands in your Square account like any other sale and the invoice closes itself back in ServiceBuilt.
Nothing, on either plan, and we do the moving — customers, jobs, estimates, invoices, payments and price book. You review what came across, and what did not, before anything goes live.
We migrate your history free on either plan, and we do the moving. If it is not better than what you have, you have lost nothing but a month.
No contract · Cancel in the app · Unlimited technicians
