ServiceTitan vs. FieldEdge: The Differences That Matter For Residential Service Businesses

Google Local Services Ads Integration

Utilizing Google’s Local Services Ads has become an essential tool for service businesses to reach new customers in their service area—and to show up in front of the right people at the right time. 

It has a huge advantage compared to classic Google Search or Display ads because businesses only pay for leads that actually call to inquire about or book service—rather than paying for clicks that may or may not result in a lead or booked job.

ServiceTitan has an integration with Google Local Services Ads. So, for businesses that use Local Services Ads, prospective customers can book appointments straight through Google without ever speaking to a CSR. They can view available times, input relevant job details such as contact information, address, and service needs, and book service appointments.

Job details are automatically transferred into ServiceTitan’s customer database for companies to see, which has two significant advantages:

1. As more and more people want the ability to book appointments digitally without having to speak with a CSR, it provides an improved customer experience that appeals to many people.

2. It frees up time for CSR’s by saving them from having to book every appointment over the phone. Instead, when appointments are booked via Local Services Ads, they can simply review the job, follow up with any necessary questions, and begin the scheduling and dispatching process.

At present, FieldEdge has no such integration. For businesses using Local Services Ads, customers have no way to book appointments digitally through Google’s platform. They need to call to speak directly to a CSR, and the CSR needs to manually input each customer’s information and job details into their system—taking up valuable time from CSR’s that they could be spending on other tasks.

Maintenance Agreement Management

Similar to leveraging Local Services Ads, offering maintenance agreements or having a membership agreement program is another best practice in the residential service industry. Maintenance agreements allow businesses to maintain a recurring customer base and generate predictable revenue during shoulder seasons.

While both ServiceTitan and FieldEdge have features for managing maintenance agreements, our product has some advantages in workflow, efficiency, and customer experience.

Namely, ServiceTitan offers a more seamless way of accessing membership information at the beginning of the call booking process. For example, when a customer who has a maintenance agreement calls in, our system automatically recognizes that homeowner that’s calling as a member. It tells CSRs the exact details of their maintenance agreement, including when that person is due for their next scheduled visit. 

This allows CSRs to: 

A) Immediately recognize a membership customer as such and treat them accordingly

B) Immediately have access to their membership type and next scheduled visit

C) Save time from having to look their membership details up in another part of their system to find relevant membership information

D) Handle maintenance scheduling with ease

In contrast, FieldEdge users don’t automatically see this information when answering an incoming call. While they’re on the call, they’ll need to bounce to another area within their system to find these details, which diminishes workflow efficiency for CSRs, and importantly, diminishes the experiences of valuable customers.

Adjustable Capacity Planning

From small businesses to larger residential shops, scheduling is key to a high performing business. The ability to execute scheduling well—balancing and maximizing the number of jobs booked with the number of tech hours you can deliver on any given day—has significant implications on it’s revenue and profitability.

If you underbook too often, you lose out on revenue and potentially waste overhead on unutilized techs. If you overbook too often, there are yet more implications: upsetting customers, overextending techs, wasting time and resources on rescheduling appointments.

While both FieldEdge and ServiceTitan offer scheduling features, only our product offers adjustable capacity planning to maximize and balance your schedule. Adjustable capacity planning provides business owners and CSRs with an accurate view of tech capacity for the right techs to go to the right jobs. In addition, this also provides business owners to more reliably over and underbook capacity based on the type of job or weather conditions.

Rather than dispatchers having to rely on memory or constantly referencing other parts of their system to figure out technician capacity when scheduling appointments, this information is calculated for them and right at their fingertips—allowing them to book jobs more seamlessly, and more consistently maximize tech capacity.

Real Time Technician Tracking

For many residential homeowners, knowing when a technician will arrive at your home is an essential part of having a good customer experience. 

In the past, a common model has been to provide customers with a window of time (e.g. between 12pm and 2pm) in which a tech will arrive for their job. But from a customer’s perspective, this hasn’t been a great experience. They need to wait around for the entire period, wasting valuable time in some cases, and not knowing when exactly a tech will show. 

To solve this problem, many FSMs (including FieldEdge) offer SMS notification features that allow techs to let customers know when they’re on the way. But with ServiceTitan’s GPS-enabled mobile app (compatible on both iOS and Android devices), customers have the ability to see and track their technician on a map (as shown in the screenshot below). This allows them to view real time data on when techs will arrive, which gives them more freedom to use their time how they’d like to.

And as an added benefit, business owners and managers can more clearly see how technicians spend their time when in route from job to job, which fosters more accountability and transparency within the company.

Reporting Capabilities

Custom reporting is another feature that’s common in FSMs and offered by both FieldEdge and ServiceTitan. But while both products offer reporting functionality, ServiceTitan differs in two key ways.

First, we offer greater customizability. So if you’re a business owner or manager who wants the flexibility to create really specific reports—like a scorecard for a single technician working on a specific business unit in a specific area—in ServiceTitan you have the power to create this. 

Second, and perhaps even more important, ServiceTitan allows businesses to drill down into their reports and identify exactly where the information is coming from. Users can click on any metric being reported, and trace it all the way back to the specific job or jobs it relates to. Business owners find this ability absolutely invaluable for being able to trust their numbers—and this is a capability that isn’t offered currently in FieldEdge. 

ServiceTitan vs. FieldEdge: The Differences That Matter For Commercial Service Businesses

Customer Specific Pricing

For commercial service businesses, it’s not uncommon to have a need for creating customer specific pricing. For example, if you’re a contractor working on a deal with a chain of big box stores, you might negotiate contracts that have unique pricing for just that account. 

In these cases—which again, aren’t uncommon—if your software doesn’t have features to support customer specific pricing, you may need to use manual processes and workarounds to set this up. Most FSMs, including FieldEdge, don’t offer features to easily execute this. 

In contrast, ServiceTitan has built features specifically for commercial businesses to provide greater ease of use in the customization of pricing.  Users can easily customize pricing on a customer by customer basis by setting specific pricing rules based on certain customers or locations. And they can also set up automated labor and materials charges that support time and materials billing.

Customer Portal

Many FSMs offer customer portal functionality that allows a service business’s customers to take certain actions such as view estimates and pay invoices. 

FieldEdge’s customer portal is a quote management portal powered by a third party integration. It allows customers to view individual estimates and make payments by clicking on a link. However, customers are only able to view information about that specific estimate—they can’t view service history or other relevant details that commercial customers like having access to.

In contrast, ServiceTitan has a more robust customer portal that is built into our platform (there’s no need to be redirected to a third party app). Our portal provides customers with the ability to create an account that allows them to review invoices, make online payments, and view their service history—all right from within the ServiceTitan platform.

This gives commercial customers greater access to the details of their engagement with you and puts more information at their fingertips to create a better overall customer experience. 

Project Tracking

In contrast to residential service work, which commonly involves day-of and short term service engagements, commercial service often involves working on longer term construction projects, increasing the need for project management and tracking capabilities.

ServiceTitan has a set of features built for subcontractors and commercial service businesses to streamline both the tracking of progress on projects and the tracking of profits in real-time.

While FieldEdge offers some project tracking capabilities, they’re limited compared to what we now offer. Specifically, they don’t offer the equivalent of our project dashboard.

Within our project dashboard, business owners can see real-time KPIs such as project details, revenue recognition, job costing, opportunities, and trends for projects by business unit. 

Users can see budget versus actual and expense details that are updated in real-time—allowing them to maintain an accurate and essential view of the financials on their project.

This ability to access these details, drill into specifics, and have data automatically updated is absolutely invaluable for ensuring profitability on projects. This information allows contractors to make informed decisions at each step of a project, and significantly cuts down on manual effort it takes to manage the process of job tracking manually.

Form Capabilities

One of the core functions of an FSM is to host forms and documents in a single place, and make them easy to organize and access. And while both ServiceTitan and FieldEdge offer these capabilities, ServiceTitan has a number of features that offer greater flexibility and efficiency when it comes to form management.

For example, our platform provides the option to upload PDF forms that were created outside of ServiceTitan. If you have forms living on your desktop and want to have them hosted in our system, you can easily upload them.

We also make it easy to duplicate forms. So, if a technician needs to complete multiple copies of the same form for a job—e.g. When they’re servicing multiple pieces of equipment in one location—they don’t need to recreate the same document multiple times. They can duplicate the initial document and customize it accordingly.

And lastly, we have a new feature called Dynamic Forms. Dynamic forms use conditional logic to update form fields based on information that’s populated. For example, if a water heater is tankless, the form automatically updates to only display questions related to tankless water heaters. 

The advantages of dynamic forms are two fold. First, businesses can ensure techs and office staff follow best practices when executing day to day workflows. And second, businesses can improve the quality of their data—ensuring the right information is documented for every job.

Inventory Management

An FSM’s ability to facilitate equipment tracking and inventory management is another key thing to pay attention to when choosing a product for your business.

Both FieldEdge and ServiceTitan technically offer inventory management. However, similar to certain features discussed above, FieldEdge relies on a third party—QuickBooks—for inventory management. Whereas ServiceTitan has inventory management built natively into our platform.

When you use FieldEdge, you need to bounce back and forth between their platform and QuickBooks to view and manage your inventory. This decreases workflow efficiency, and requires users to have equal competency and familiarity with both platforms and the ways they work together.

In contrast, with ServiceTitan you can manage your inventory right from within our platform, and it’s seamlessly integrated with other key features like our Pricebook. This helps to further streamline your workflows and ensure inventory is always accurate and up to date.

When It Comes Weighing FieldEdge Alternatives, the Differences Matter

Inevitably, many of the FSMs on the market today include some of the same features—scheduling, dispatching, customer support, inventory management, call recording, invoicing, timesheets, CRM, and work order management, to name a few. And as we mentioned above, this makes competing software solutions can look very much alike, even when what they actually offer is quite different. 

That’s why, rather than make a decision about which FSM to use based on pricing and surface-level resemblance, we suggest that field service businesses dig deeper to get an in-depth understanding of how products like ServiceTitan and FieldEdge truly stand to help them reach their goals, and how they compare. 

We hope that this article has helped you better understand the key feature differences between ServiceTitan and FieldEdge, so you can arrive at the field management software solution that’s best for you.

Discover what ServiceTitan can do for your commercial or home service business. Schedule a call to get a free demo of our software today.