Get the dispatch board and QuickBooks talking to each other.

Field-service software for HVAC has no shortage of options. What most of them don’t do well is the specific mechanics of pricing a job correctly the first time, keeping the office and a technician in the field in sync without a phone call, and posting a clean, correct invoice into whatever accounting system the shop actually already runs, not the one the software vendor wishes they ran.

We built a real system to those specifications for an HVAC contractor in southern Ontario, a shop running 3-4 technicians out of one dispatch office. The requirements didn’t come from a generic feature list. They came from the owner’s own description of what was actually broken.

The pricing problem: two re-entries, two chances to get it wrong

Before this system existed, pricing a job worked like this: a supplier invoice for parts came in, the office added a markup by hand onto a paper work order, and the bookkeeper then re-typed that same work order into QuickBooks. Every job passed through two manual re-entry steps between a supplier invoice and a posted invoice, and every re-entry is a chance to fat-finger a number or drop a line item.

What we built replaces both steps with one: a review queue where every completed job lands for office pricing before it can become an invoice, with four customer-level, per-customer-overridable pricing fields (labour rate, a minimum call-hours floor, materials markup, and a service charge), matching the shop’s own stated need for pricing that differs by customer rather than a flat rate applied to everyone. Once it’s reviewed and priced, it goes to QuickBooks. It’s typed once.

Dispatch that shows what’s actually happening in the field

The old process assigned technicians from memory, with no system check for a double-booking and no way to see, once a tech was assigned, whether they’d accepted the job, were on the way, were delayed, or had turned it down. The office found out by calling.

The dispatch board we built shows technicians by day with one job card per work order, drag-and-drop rescheduling, and a warning (not a hard block) when an assignment would double-book someone, because the office wanted the system to flag a conflict and let a human make the call, not stop them outright. On the technician’s own phone: status buttons for accepted, on my way, delayed, or rejected, visible to the office within seconds, not after a callback.

Overtime that’s calculated once and shown on the document the customer signs

Overtime wasn’t automatically calculated or clearly disclosed on the old paper work orders. The shop specifically asked for a visible multiplier indicator so the rate was legible on the signed document, not buried in a later invoice line.

What we built calculates overtime under two independent, non-stacking rules, a flat weekend premium (Saturday and Sunday) or Ontario’s Employment Standards Act 44-hour weekly threshold, whichever applies, and shows the actual reason in plain text on the document the customer signs (for example, “1.5x - Saturday” or “1.5x - over 44 hours this week”), not a bare asterisk that needs explaining after the fact. Once a customer signs, that record is frozen. A correction elsewhere in the same week’s timesheet can’t quietly rewrite a document someone already put their name on.

Recurring maintenance contracts that surface themselves

Quarterly and seasonal maintenance work is exactly the kind of job that falls through the cracks in a manually-tracked schedule, because nothing forces it back onto anyone’s radar until a customer calls asking why nobody showed up. We built a due-this-week filter that surfaces recurring maintenance jobs automatically on the dispatch board, instead of relying on someone remembering a customer’s tune-up cadence.

Parking, photos, and the small stuff that adds up

Technicians paying for parking out of pocket and getting reimbursed on an informal, unverified basis was a real complaint in the shop’s own requirements. We built a photo-based parking-expense flow directly into the job page: photograph the receipt, enter the amount, and it routes to an office approval queue before it can appear anywhere near an invoice. For a downtown job, a nearest-parking-lot lookup helps a technician find a spot without guessing, built from public municipal parking data rather than a live GPS feed or a paid API.

Photo capture on job completion, including automatic handling of iPhone photo formats so nothing shows up broken on the office side, and a signature pad for customer sign-off, round out what a technician does on their own phone before leaving a site. No native app store install. It runs as an installable page in the technician’s own phone browser.

Where a subscription product is honestly the better call

We’ll say this plainly, because it’s the most credible thing we can tell you: for a shop whose accounting already runs on QuickBooks Online and whose business rules match what a mainstream tool offers out of the box, Jobber or Housecall Pro is very likely the better buy on pure feature-for-dollar terms. The custom-build case is narrow: QuickBooks Desktop integration instead of a forced platform migration, automatic non-stacking overtime with a customer-visible reason, per-customer pricing without paying for a rules-engine subscription tier, and no per-seat cost as a crew grows past whatever a pricing tier caps out at. If none of that describes your shop, buy the subscription and put the difference toward another truck.