Business Software Built for Contractors

What Separates ServiceTitan From Other Field Service Management Software?

When shopping for field service management software (FSMs), it’s difficult to tell products apart from each other on the surface. FSMs offer many of the same features, so businesses have no clear way of knowing which software would benefit them most for their investment.

As we’ve discussed and demonstrated in our in-depth comparison articles on competitors such as Housecall Pro, FieldEdge, ServiceFusion, Jobber, and others, these products function quite differently in practice.

Compared to other FSMs, there are two key differences that set ServiceTitan apart from other software solutions:

1. A True All-In-One Platform: Where many FSMs on the market rely heavily on third-party integrations to offer wide feature sets, ServiceTitan relies on relatively few integrations; the vast majority of our features are built natively into our platform. 

2. Greater Capabilities While Maintaining Ease of Use: Some of our competitors have user-friendly platforms but limited functions. In many of the features that we offer, ServiceTitan provides more sophisticated functionality that allows business owners, office staff, and field service technicians to do more with less effort. 

Below we’re going to elaborate on these differences and explain why they matter to field service companies that want to invest in an FSM. But first, let’s briefly define what field service management software is. 

Want to see how ServiceTitan works to streamline your field service operations? Schedule a call to get a free, live, one-on-one walk-through of the features we describe throughout this article.

What Is Field Service Management Software?

Field Service Management (FSM) Software are holistic solutions that help field service businesses streamline operations and grow revenue. FSMs typically help businesses facilitate a wide range of business functions such as call booking, scheduling, dispatching, generating estimates and invoices, and processing payments. 

As we mentioned above, although FSMs tend to offer these same sets of features, there are significant differences in the way these features actually work. Below we’ll look at the key differences that separate ServiceTitan from other FSMs. 

ServiceTitan Difference #1: A True All-In-One Platform That Relies Minimally on Third-Party Integrations

Businesses in the field service industry have complex operations that require a wide variety of tools to meet their business needs. Whether you’re a small business or a large one, FSM products should provide many different features for each step of a service business’s workflow, such as:

• Scheduling and dispatching

• Work order management

• Mobile apps available on iOS and Androidmobile devices

• Time tracking, routing, and GPS tracking capabilities for field technicians

• Estimates and proposals

• Invoicing and payment processing

It’s very common for FSM products to rely heavily on third-party apps to offer this wide array of features. In other words, rather than building all of this functionality into their product, they’ll partner with companies who have already developed solutions for specific features.

While this may seem trivial on the surface, in practice it can lead to a number of inconveniences for field service businesses. For example:

• Workflow Inefficiencies: Third-party integrations, such as integrations with CRM or ERP software, often require bouncing back and forth between your FSM and other apps as your staff completes various steps throughout the lifecycle of a job. This creates inefficiencies from additional time spent moving between apps, and also diminishes the overall user experience for employees.

• Additional Costs: Third-party integrations often come at additional costs, which—if you want to have all of the features you need to operate—make products more expensive than they appear to be.

• Additional Effort to Learn Separate App Interfaces: Third-party integrations often require your staff to invest time in learning how to navigate and use different apps, as well as learn how the integrations work in connection with their FSM.

In contrast to FSMs that require many different app integrations to provide service businesses with the tools they need, ServiceTitan has built the majority of our features natively into our product. 

Outside of a few necessary integrations, such as our accounting integrations with QuickBooks and Intacct, ServiceTitan users don’t need to bounce between different apps, pay additional costs, or learn tons of different tools. They can manage the majority of their business operations right from within our all-in-one platform, which saves time during day-to-day operations and provides an improved customer experience.

ServiceTitan Difference #2: Greater Capabilities For Field Service Businesses While Maintaining Ease of Use

In addition to building the majority of our features natively into our platform, ServiceTitan offers greater capabilities to service businesses that make a big difference in the overall experience of using our product. 

In this section we’ll walk through five examples that demonstrate what we mean by “greater capabilities.” These will give you an idea of the additional value that ServiceTitan can provide compared to other FSMs.

Example #1: Advanced Capacity Planning For a Seamless and Profitable Scheduling Experience

Many service businesses want to set a capacity planning strategy that allows them to create more or less space in their calendar for certain types of jobs during different times of the year.

For example, during busy seasons, an HVAC business might want to limit the number of maintenance agreement appointments to ensure they have ample space for more profitable replacement or repair jobs. Or they may want to do the opposite during slow times of year, increasing space in their calendar for maintenance appointments when they anticipate fewer calls for replacement and repair.

The challenge is that actually implementing these strategies is difficult because scheduling is a fast-paced, urgent, on-the-fly process. CSRs tend to have very little time to consider capacity strategies when booking appointments. And they also tend to be the most junior employees in a service business, so implementing these strategies often isn’t intuitive for them. 

With ServiceTitan, businesses can set rules and parameters within their scheduling settings that automate the implementation of these types of capacity strategies. When CSRs view the schedule while on a call, they will see availability only for specific types of jobs based on set parameters. 

This means that business owners can ensure that CSRs don’t over- or underbook certain types of jobs, allowing them to maintain and optimize their schedule for the highest profitability. Meanwhile, CSRs' lives are made easier because they don’t have to think about these additional factors while they’re on a call— freeing them up to establish better customer relationships over the phone. 

At this time, very few FSMs offer this type of automated capacity planning functionality.

Example #2: Bulk Editing and Automation Features For Streamlined Pricebook Management

Pricebooks are the backbone of a service business. A well-designed and well-maintained pricebook can make the difference between the profitable year to date or ending the year at a huge loss. As a result, a business’s ability to manage and update their pricebook is absolutely essential. 

However, most FSMs on the market tend to require exporting pricebooks to spreadsheets, and reimporting them each time a business wants to make an update (whether small or large). This is an inconvenience that can lead to delays in updating pricing that affect profitability (and require additional effort and time from staff). 

ServiceTitan, in contrast, allows back-office staff to easily make updates to their pricebook right from within our platform. Users can update individual pricebook items, or use our bulk editing features to update groups of items (or make pricebook-wide updates), without ever leaving the pricebook interface.

Pricebook updates are then automatically reflected throughout the platform in real-time, meaning the very next estimates and proposals—whether they’re created in the office or by service professionals in the field—will have the most up-to-date pricing. 

In addition, our Pricebook Connect feature—free to any users that want to leverage it—allows businesses to access a number of top industry supplier catalogs, and add any items they wish from those catalogs right to their pricebook. Then, any time those pricebook items are updated by suppliers (whether that’s pricing, images, or product descriptions and details), those changes can be automatically reflected in your pricebook with a couple clicks.

And finally, with our flat-rate pricebook add-on product, Pricebook Pro, businesses can streamline pricebook management even further. Our team of industry experts has built a service-based, flat-rate pricebook—following best practices and based on industry average prices. They continually manage and update the pricebook so that you don’t have to, providing a complete plug-and-play experience that’s optimized for profitability. 

Note: In addition to the above, we also offer a feature that allows businesses to create customer-specific pricing. Designed for commercial service businesses, this functionality allows our customers to provide different prices to certain customers based on contracts, demographic, and relationships. This is a common need of commercial-focused businesses that is not generally met by other FSMs.

Example #3: A Suite of Project Management Tools For Longer-Term Jobs

Service businesses that work on longer-term commercial service jobs often have different needs than businesses that focus exclusively on short-term residential service and repair work. For example, it’s common for them to need deeper job-costing capabilities, the ability to facilitate progress billing, and deeper capabilities for creating and tracking purchase orders. 

Most FSMs do not have sophisticated features to help execute these activities. In contrast, with ServiceTitan, users have access to a suite of features that help facilitate these essential job management workflows. These features include tools for managing:

• Job Financials: At-a-glance access to budgets versus actual reports to help commercial business owners understand in real time the exact budget of each job and project—as well as the ability to generate applications for payment, continuation sheets, and invoices.

• Purchasing: The ability to initiate requisitions of equipment and materials, as well as create and track purchase orders (which are automatically reflected in job costing financials). 

• Estimates: Create detailed estimates, as well as track sold and unsold estimates.

Service Team: Tracking technician timesheets (and have all labor hours automatically reflected and visible in job financials).

Instead of needing to find separate SaaS tools for these key functions, users have many project management essentials right at their fingertips in our platform. 

Example #4: The Ability to Drill Down Into Reporting Data

Reporting functionality is one of the most desired feature sets by service business owners looking for FSMs. Their ability to create dashboards and automated reports for measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) is invaluable for tracking the health of their business, as well as anticipating, spotting, and solving problems before they get out of hand. 

But while many FSMs offer reporting features, they often lack the ability to click into numbers that are shared in reports. As a result, business owners and managers are forced to either a) blindly trust the numbers that are being reported or b) manually look into other parts of the platform to piece together data and verify the accuracy of their numbers.

In contrast, every number that is reported in ServiceTitan can be clicked on to reveal the sources of that data—down to the exact jobs and technicians that led to a particular revenue metric, for example. This saves business owners significant time while providing them peace of mind and greater confidence in the numbers that matter for their business. 

Note: In addition to having a greater ability to drill down into your numbers, ServiceTitan also allows commercial businesses to roll-up reporting across multiple business units (or across different trades and customers) to provide a holistic real-time view on the business. While some competitors may also offer real-time reporting, many require multiple systems to accomplish this same thing.

Example #5: Offline Functionality That Provides Mobile Access Out of Cell Service Zones

Responding to service requests outside of cell service zones is commonplace for many trade service providers. However, many FSMs lack offline functionality for their mobile apps. So if a field technician is at a job and they don’t have service, they’re unable to rely on their mobile app during the job—the very tool that they need for many key job functions. 

This means they don’t have access to their SOP checklists, or the key job and customer information that was collected over the phone, and they’re often forced to revert back to pen and paper—the very thing that businesses are trying to get away from when they invest in an FSM. 

ServiceTitan’s mobile app, in contrast, provides offline functionality that allows field workers to operate seamlessly with their mobile devices even when there’s no cell service. They’re equipped to handle business as usual no matter where they’re working, and all data collected in the app is automatically uploaded to the cloud as soon as they’re back in a cell service area.

The Best Field Service Management Solution For Trade Service Businesses

The five examples we’ve covered above demonstrate the efforts we’ve made to create the absolute best field service management solution for trade service contractors. In nearly every feature of our product, more of these examples can be found. And we’re continuously building and improving features to provide the utmost customer satisfaction for our users.

In addition to the features we’ve discussed throughout this article, we offer many other tools for key business functions such as:

• Call booking

• Marketing

• Membership management

• Customer relationship management (CRM) features (notifications, customer portal, etc.)

• Inventory management

• Financing

• Property data

• And more

To see how all of these features look and feel, and how they can help streamline your service business operations, schedule a call to get a free, live, one-on-one walk-through of ServiceTitan.