1. Pricebook Functionality

Few if any elements of a service contractor’s business are as important to their success as their pricebook: the comprehensive document that lists everything their company buys and sells, their labor costs and job types, all of the materials and equipment associated with their work, and the markups that help them arrive at the final price for each and every job they do. 

Whether they’re plumbers, electricians, or HVAC or pest control specialists, the pricebook is an indispensable tool that allows service companies to determine whether they’re setting prices to maximize profitability. And in this vital area, the differences between ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro are vast.     

An effective pricebook—the kind that makes contractors more efficient and more profitable—is a dynamic, complex document, capable of synthesizing tons of variables and moving parts.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of FSMs, including Housecall Pro, simply don’t provide that kind of functionality, requiring contractors to manually cross reference labor rates, markups, and material costs in a tedious, time-consuming process that can produce costly errors.    

With ServiceTitan, contractors get a tool that seamlessly and accurately integrates all of the variables that go into pricing jobs, beginning with the materials and equipment they use every day. 

Regardless of industry, a majority of service contractors rely on equipment from a handful of main manufacturers, and with ServiceTitan, users can access constantly updated equipment catalogues from their preferred brands, including companies like Carrier, Bryant, Lennox, Amana, American Standard, Dalkin, Goodman, and Dynamic ACS. 

Here’s an example of what our pricebook feature looks like in our mobile app:

With instantaneous access to these catalogues via mobile app or desktop, contractors and their employees can build estimates—complete with full color photos to show homeowners on their iPad or tablet—using precisely the makes, model numbers, and sizing of the equipment that will actually be used in a given job. This eliminates the need for guesswork and placeholders, ensuring that business owners and service techs alike arrive at accurate numbers for job costing, markup, and installation rates every time.

To further improve efficiency, contractors can also draw on their favorite materials catalogues to build installation packages and service tasks that their techs and sales staff can refer to again and again.  

With an automation-enabled process, ServiceTitan users can populate their pricebooks with up-to-date data from their favored vendor catalogues. But we know that even with that very substantial leg up, many service contractors don’t want to have to build their pricebook from scratch. That’s why we make it easy to import any of a number of high-quality pre-built pricebooks for use with ServiceTitan. (We also offer our own, PriceBook Pro, as an add-on.)   

To help contractors get their pricebooks just right, ServiceTitan provides  billable hour and markup calculators, allowing business owners to figure out exactly what they need to charge per hour, and how much they should be marking up materials in order to cover all of their overhead and turn a healthy profit. Contractors can even set rules for markups: a 5X markup for anything less than $10, let’s say, and a 3X rate for materials costing more.

To stay competitive, of course, contractors often need to make adjustments—to account for price changes, for example, or new tariffs, or even a global pandemic. With ServiceTitan, it’s easy to make these tweaks across an entire pricebook automatically—and with surgical precision: updating only those jobs and prices affected by new material costs, for example, rather than applying a global fixed-rate change, which might result in inaccurate prices for jobs, like a drain cleaning, that don’t involve any materials at all.

With ServiceTitan, contractors can even program their pricebooks to prompt techs while they’re on-site with suggestions for additional repairs related to the work they’re already doing. It’s an invaluable feature for improving cross-selling and upselling rates, often leading to higher overall average ticket prices.    

With Housecall Pro, contractors are mostly limited to cross referencing various spreadsheets in order to come up with pricing. The software doesn’t provide access to updated manufacturer catalogues or allow contractors to build installation packages. There are no automated pricing updates or automated job costing features. Housecall Pro doesn’t help contractors upsell or cross-sell, or allow them to import pre-populated pricebooks. With Housecall Pro, the pricebook is less a dynamic platform that enables business growth than a static data-storage tool.   

2. Reporting Capabilities

No matter how innovative or hardworking a business owner might be, if they don’t have a deep, fine-grained understanding of their numbers, they’re going to have a very hard time improving their business. 

Without robust reporting capabilities, it’s difficult for contractors to even get a concrete sense of the basics. For example: 

• If and how they might be losing money

• Which employees are excelling and which are lagging behind

• Which marketing strategies are paying off and which are simply draining away resources

A lot of FSMs purport to offer strong reporting features, but in reality, few of them do. And this is another key area where there are major differences between Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan.

With ServiceTitan, to monitor employee performance, contractors can refer to a scorecard for every one of their hires: customer service reps, field service technicians, managers, and more. Loaded with easy-to-understand, fully customizable stats on things like revenue generation, service agreements, jobs completed, incoming calls and call conversions, these scorecards can bring owners up to speed near-instantaneously.    

Our software also features a real-time corollary to the employee scorecard, in the form of a field reporting dashboard, which allows contractors to effectively observe their techs as they go about their workday in the field, receiving live updates on those same customizable scorecard indicators. 

In addition, ServiceTitan also features a non-job time tracking tool, allowing business owners to better understand how employees are spending their working hours when they’re not actually on a job site—and providing insights as to how they might become more efficient.  

Between these features, contractors get a crystal clear picture of what their employees greatest strengths are and how they might be most usefully deployed to best serve both the business and its clients.  

ServiceTitan users also get access to similar reports and up-to-the-moment data on sales tracking, accounts receivable, maintenance agreement profitability, and marketing campaigns. Contractors can see where their investments are being well spent—and monitored—where funds might be better allocated, and what areas of their business need the most improvement.   

Based on our conversations with many contractors who’ve switched from Housecall Pro to ServiceTitan, our sense is that by comparison, Housecall Pro’s reporting features tend to have limited capabilities. 

For example, if three techs spend the morning working on a single job with a total ticket price of $500, Housecall Pro might report that each employee had an average ticket price for that time frame of $500, suggesting that the company took in $1,500—three times the true amount.

Similarly, in instances where a tech presents Good, Better, and Best options to a homeowner, and then makes a sale, Housecall Pro will sometimes treat each option as a separate sales opportunity, recording a close rate of 33%.   

Over time, the errors illustrated by these examples can have disastrous effects on a service business. Housecall Pro also lacks the capability to analyze return on investment for marketing spend—often 5-10 percent of a company’s total revenue—and while it does have an optional upgrade that furnishes more complex reporting, the upgrade functions as a separate interface, disconnected from the primary FSM, limiting its utility.

Note: Also useful for service businesses is our QuickBooks integration, which has a Sync-As-You-Go feature that ensures your accounting remains accurate and up to date. 

3. Tagging Features

While both ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro have tagging features, in ServiceTitan, tags aren’t merely reminders, but dynamic tools for growing revenue, often by encouraging employees to focus on preferred KPIs.  

For example, ServiceTitan’s “smart tags” can be automatically attached to jobs, based on the type of job, the service tech, or even on the age or type of equipment involved. The same tags can be built into the pricebook, so that business owners can gauge their company’s performance in conversion opportunity scenarios: 

• How often are they selling maintenance plans? 

• How often are they closing on visits to homes with 10-year-old HVAC systems? 

Customers can be tagged, too, based, for example, on the type of work that has been previously performed at their home. That way, the next person who looks at that customer’s history can be prompted to follow up on past work. 

Every time a tech performs a drain cleaning, for instance, a tag can be applied to that customer, planting a seed for follow-up sales during future visits. Smart tags can even be used to build marketing campaigns. With ServiceTitan, it’s easy to automatically populate an audience with all customers who’ve been tagged for drain cleaning work, making it a snap to send email blast notifying just the part of the customer base that your company is currently running a special on biologic drain cleaners.

4. Facilitating Accountability Across Your Organization

As we’ve written previously, one of the essentials to success for any service contracting business is having a well-defined sales process. But having a sales process is only half the battle. The other half, of course, is getting service techs and salespeople to follow it. The same might be said for a variety of other protocols: CSR scripts, comfort surveys, safety procedures, and more.

Where these kinds of employee accountability issues are concerned, making it easier to ensure their employees are sticking to best practices simply isn’t part of Housecall Pro’s current functionality.    

At ServiceTitan, however, it’s been top-of-mind: an important part of our effort to help service professionals streamline the many moving parts of their entire business into a seamless, well-oiled machine.

Using gated work sequences and customizable forms, ServiceTitan users can guide employees through step-by-step processes for any task that might otherwise create opportunities for techs, salespeople, or CSRs to forget, overlook, or ignore best practices: 

• Working through safety checks

• Seeking out opportunities to upsell or cross-sell

• Posing required questions to homeowners about their wants and needs that can expose new problems to sell against

By making use of these features, contractors can build consistency in employee performance, while cutting down on mistakes and hiccups. They also come in handy for training, allowing new hires to get up to speed fast. 

5. Mobile Features and Accessibility

With good reasons, many FSMs—including ServiceTitan—advertise their mobile capabilities. Unfortunately, not all mobile capabilities are created equal. In some cases, an FSM’s mobile design can actually create more headaches than it solves, decreasing a contractor’s overall efficiency. 

Such is the case with Housecall Pro in a couple of key areas:

• Texting

• Offline functionality

While both ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro include SMS messaging, employees of a company using ServiceTitan can communicate with one another via text from an iPhone, Android, or other iOS device while they’re out in the field, or from their desktop, if they’re working in-office. Housecall Pro’s texting feature only works via mobile, meaning that CSRs and other employees who primarily use a desktop computer for work have to constantly switch between screens in order to communicate with service techs by text. 

The arrangement is inconvenient—necessitating that office staff toggle out of their main workflow to handle text conversations—to the extent that some service contractors simply tell their CSRs not to use Housecall Pro’s text feature.      

In the context of an FSM, a primary benefit of texting features is facilitating real-time conversations between field and office employees over the course of the workday. Properly executed with an advanced API like ServiceTitan’s, texting can provide invaluable support to service technicians. For example:

• Verification of the availability of materials

• Confirmation of scheduling

• Double-checking the compatibility of equipment

But inconvenient, inefficient text communications, which require office workers to switch between their desktop and mobile device, can cause costly problems: delays, misdiagnoses, inaccuracies in installation or billing, missed opportunities to sell, poor customer experience. 

By the same token, a field service management solution is only as useful as it is accessible to the business owners and employees that rely on it. That’s why, at ServiceTitan, we designed our software to provide users full access to their account—complete with pricebook, tags, follow-up reminders, cross-sell and upsell prompts, workflow forms, etc.—even when they’re out in the field in an area where they can’t get online.  

This is another key difference between us and Housecall Pro: Housecall Pro has no offline mode.

Without access to their FSM offline, Housecall Pro users have little choice but to revert to other apps or pen-and-paper methods, relying on their memory to recall prices, and factor in materials, labor costs, and membership discounts when they’re coming up with estimates to present to customers. Later, someone back at the office will likely have to input the handwritten notes from those visits into their FSM system.    

This process introduces numerous opportunities for the kinds of human error that can result in botched estimates, substandard work, and reputational damage. And without access to their FSM, field service technicians are forced to present to homeowners without the selling tools and visual aids they might otherwise rely on to close deals.     

6. Customer Portal

The customer portal is another feature that ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro technically share, but which is actually a significant differentiator between the two products. 

Housecall Pro’s portal is limited to membership customers only. Homeowners who have service plans with contractors that subscribe to Housecall Pro can use their portal to perform membership tasks, like updating a credit card on file. But for everyday customers, without service agreements, Housecall Pro’s portal provides no utility at all. 

We know that for field service companies, offering a customer experience that is focused on ease of use can make a huge difference, especially when it comes to winning repeat business from homeowners—even if they don’t spring for a membership plan. That’s why we’ve made ServiceTitan’s user-friendly customer portal available to all customers. 

Homeowners can use it for online booking and to reference any information they might want. For example: 

• Past work

• Outstanding proposals

• Credit card information

• Unpaid invoices

Rather than putting a check in the mail or providing their credit card number over the phone, they can also use the portal to pay their bills—an improvement in convenience that simultaneously gives contractors another path to closing open receivable.     

Many of the contractors we work with have found that simply making this payment option available has helped to improve cash flow. With more cash on hand, they’re more nimble—able to capitalize on short notice on things like end-of-the year discounts on old stock at the supply warehouse.

Conclusion 

We began this article by noting that many of the FSMs on the market today offer some of the same features—things like scheduling, dispatching, customer support, inventory management, call booking, invoicing, timesheets, CRM, and work order management, which are vital to the operation of most field service businesses. 

But as illustrated above, scratch the surface and it becomes clear that there are actually major differences between products like ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro, particularly in the areas we’ve focused on: 

• Pricebook Functionality

• Reporting Capabilities

• Tagging Features

• Facilitating Accountability Across Your Organization

• Mobile Features and Accessibility 

• Customer Portal 

While Housecall Pro offers a decent software platform, ServiceTitan is designed to be not merely software, but a tool that can truly help contractors do better business management. This fundamental difference is reflected in the way we assist our users in learning to use ServiceTitan to get the most out of the product.

With ServiceTitan’s NEXT feature, subscribers can create a near-precise copy of their account in an environment disconnected from the actual operation of their business. It functions as a kind of sandbox/tutorial where contractors can experiment with the software and try out new features as they become available, without worrying that they’ll damage the operating system or records that they actually use to conduct business.

Whenever contractors have questions, they can hop on a call with a dedicated ServiceTitan success manager, who can not only help them work through any issues they might be having, but also better understand how to use the software’s many features to optimize their operations. 

Housecall Pro, which has nothing similar to NEXT, offers only chat support. Nor does Housecall Pro provide anything analogous to our Titan Score, which gives subscribers a rating indicating how much they’re actually getting out of the system—and what features they might make better use of to improve their return on investment and further lower the cost of ownership. Like ServiceTitan’s other customer support features, it’s designed to ensure that subscribers take full advantage of all of the resources available to them.