The Monday report nobody should still be building by hand.
Every service company I have looked at has the same three or four jobs being done by hand: a weekly report assembled out of the field software, the accounting system and payroll; callbacks nobody has counted properly; finished work sitting without an invoice.
I build the thing that does those jobs instead, on the software you already pay for, and hand it over owned by you. An hour on the phone is $500 and will tell you whether there is anything worth building; the build is quoted in writing before it starts.
Straight answer on where I come from: 8 years running restaurants, not HVAC. The reporting problems are the same and the trade words are not, so the first call is mostly me asking how your work actually gets recorded.
Four jobs worth looking at first
The weekly management report. Field service holds the jobs, accounting holds the money, payroll holds the hours, and somebody spends a morning every week making them agree. That report can assemble itself.
Callbacks, counted honestly. A return visit to the same address inside thirty days, tied back to the original job notes, the technician and what the second trip actually cost. Most shops know their callback rate is a problem and cannot put a number on it by crew.
Work that finished and never billed. A completed job with no invoice, a missing photo, an unsigned form. One list, every morning, of only the ones that are wrong.
Branches that each count differently. Two locations calling the same job type by two names is how a group ends up unable to compare its own crews. Agreeing the definitions is most of the work; the report after it is the easy part.
There is a working version you can open
demo.shyftkick.com is a week in the life of a home-services operator: revenue, booked jobs, cost per booked call, technician utilisation, callbacks, estimates sitting unsold, and a list of what needs attention with the evidence behind each item.
Copper Ridge is an invented company and every number in it is generated, so nothing there belongs to a real operator. The analysis is not invented: it is the same code doing the same arithmetic it would do on your own exports. Click anything in “Needs Attention” and it shows you the definition, the threshold and why it fired.
Nothing to sign into, nothing to break, and no form in front of it.
What I check before building anything
Your existing platform first. These systems report more than most offices use, and the cheapest possible outcome for you is finding out that the answer was already in there.
Then where the numbers actually come from, and how good they are. A report is only as honest as what technicians enter in the field, and if half the jobs are missing a cost code, that is the thing to fix before anything gets automated. I will tell you that rather than build something confident and wrong.
Then the one job worth doing first - usually the thing somebody is already rebuilding by hand, because its value is provable the week after it lands.
Why an operator rather than an agency
I have run the operations side of a business where the margin is thin, the reports are late and the people doing the work are flat out. That is the part that transfers. I know what a number has to do to be worth a manager’s attention, and that most reports are ignored because nobody can act on them.
What I have not done is run a service truck or price a condenser replacement, so I will not arrive telling you what your business needs. You tell me where the week goes; I tell you honestly what can be fixed, what cannot, and what your existing software already does.
The three tools on the work page were built for restaurants, and they are the clearest evidence of how I work: food cost variance, timekeeping exceptions, and one view across every location. Change the nouns and they are job cost, field-time exceptions, and one view across every branch.
Questions people actually ask
- Have you done this for HVAC companies?
- Not yet, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I have done it for restaurants - eight years in operations, more than fifty stores, and three tools on this site that I built for my own leaders. The work is the same shape: recurring reports nobody owns, numbers that disagree between systems, and exceptions a manager needs to see before the week ends. The vocabulary is what I learn from you, and the first call is mostly me asking questions.
- Doesn't our field service software already do this?
- Often, and that is the first thing I check. Most of these platforms report far more than the people using them realise, and if yours already answers the question, hearing that from me costs you an hour and nothing else. I would rather tell you that than sell you a second system that does the same job.
- What would you actually build?
- Whatever the manual job turns out to be. Usually it is one of four: a weekly management report that combines field, accounting and payroll instead of three people exporting three files; a callback review that ties repeat visits back to job notes and real cost; an exception list for completed work missing an invoice or a required photo; or branch reporting that lines every crew up on the same definitions.
- What does it cost?
- An hour on the phone is $500 and tells you whether there is anything here worth doing. After that, a build is quoted in writing per project, after a call, before anything starts. There is no licence and no seat fee: it runs in your accounts and you own it.
- Do you need access to our systems?
- Read access is enough to tell you what is possible, and I will work to whatever your office manager is comfortable with. Nothing I build writes back into your dispatch, your payroll or your invoicing unless you specifically ask for it.
- We are a small shop. Is this worth it?
- The test is not how many trucks you run. It is whether somebody does the same job by hand every week. If one person spends a morning every Monday assembling numbers out of three systems, that is a day a month, and it is the same whether you have six technicians or sixty.
Still deciding?
Take the free check first. Eight questions, no email, and you get the two things I’d fix in your building before I ask you for anything.