Operations for field service contractors
This is the one we were built for. Crews in vans, work that happens where the customer is, and an office that finds out what happened when somebody gets back or remembers to call in.
It is also the only kind of business where our answer is the whole system rather than a piece of it, and it is worth being clear about why.
Why this shape of business is different
A field service business runs on a job that moves. It gets booked, scheduled, assigned, driven to, done, signed off, and invoiced, and at almost every one of those steps the person who knows what is happening is not in the building.
That is why the spreadsheet stops working here sooner than it does anywhere else. It is not that the spreadsheet is bad. It is that six people need the same view of the same day and only one of them is at a desk.
It is also why the answering machine costs more here than in a store. A missed call is not a missed question, it is a job somebody else is doing tomorrow.
What we would put in, in what order
If the spreadsheet is the whole business, Spreadsheet Rescue is the on-ramp. We take the file, work out where its structure is fighting the work, and either rebuild it properly or move it into something built to hold it. It is a one-time fee and it comes off a build later.
If you do not know what an hour costs you, the Labor Rate Calculator is free and it is the number every other decision depends on. Plenty of businesses have quoted for years off a figure somebody worked out once.
If the crew keeps asking you things, Knowledge Management puts what the business knows somewhere they can ask it from a phone in a driveway, out of your own documents, with the file it came from.
When those stop being enough, that is North Star: the jobs, the schedule, the customers and the work in one place, built around how you actually run and hosted by us.
Your trade, specifically
The general version is useful and the specific version is more useful, so there is a page for each of the nine trades we have built for most often. Equipment history and maintenance agreements read differently for HVAC than route density does for pest control, or than property history does for plumbing.
If your trade is not among them, that is a gap in our writing rather than in what we do. The directory lists everything, and the audit does not care what you call yourself.
What we do not do
We do not replace your accounting software, and we do not replace your bookkeeper. We read from what you already keep.
We are not a dispatch product bolted to a phone system, and we are not trying to be the cheapest thing you looked at. If an unanswered phone is genuinely your whole problem, an answering service is the cheaper answer and we will say so.
Common questions
No. Most owners start with a free tool and never speak to us, which is the intended path rather than a consolation prize. The paid tools are one-off, and a build is a decision for later, if ever.
Not to use the tools or Knowledge Management, which sit alongside whatever you run today. North Star is a replacement for the spreadsheet-and-sticky-notes layer, not for your accounting.
Those are products you configure and maintain. This is built around how your business already runs and run by us, at a flat monthly with no per-technician fee. Where one of them is the better buy we say so, on the comparison pages.
Who this covers
We work with all of these. The ones linked have a page of their own, and the rest are on the list because we serve them, not because a page is coming.
- HVAC
- Plumbing
- Electrician
- Pest Control
- Carpet Cleaning
- Cleaning Services
- Pool Maintenance
- Sealcoating
- Building Maintenance
Not sure which of it you need?
Answer a few questions about how your business runs and see what to fix first, on the page, straight away. No name, no email and no sales call to get the result.
Take the free audit