Estimated Time or Duration of Jobs

We solved this by baking the time into the service itself instead of waiting on Jobber to add a duration field.

Every line item in our price book carries a code that tells us the labor block up front. Format is duration / crew size / complexity / distance:

• H1SN = half day, 1 guy, simple, near
• F1SN = full day, 1 guy, simple, near
• F2HF = full day, 2 guys, hard, far

So when the office or a tech sees H1SN on a job, there's no guessing and no digging through the description — it's a half day, one man. The estimate and the schedule come off the same line item.

To be clear, this doesn't automate anything. We still go into the calendar and manually find a slot. Jobber's "find a time" still won't help, because it doesn't know the duration. But the scheduler knows how many hours the tech needs before they start looking, so they're placing a known block instead of guessing and adjusting later. That alone killed most of the back-and-forth.

And for what it's worth, I'm with you on the feature request. If Jobber let us attach a duration to a service, then a code like H1SN would carry four hours with it automatically and "find a time" could actually find a real slot. That's the missing piece. Everything we've built is a workaround for the fact that it isn't there.

Two things I'd add:

Put the codes in your actual services and line items, not the job description. Descriptions don't sort, filter, or report — services do.

And don't show the customer the time. If they know you budgeted 4 hours and you wrap in 2, they start wondering if they should've paid less. Sell the work, not the clock.

We run about 75 prebuilt electrical services this way through AccuPrice (accupricelists.com), which syncs with Jobber — but the concept isn't trade-specific. Pavers and mowing would build the same way, you'd just define your own duration buckets.

I keep track of estimated job times by putting the expected hours right in the job description or line item notes when creating the quote.

​When it comes time to schedule, we use a external scheduling app. I drag the job onto the calendar grid and manually stretch or adjust the visit block to match the actual duration.

​If you want to save time, you can also set start and end times directly on the schedule step when creating the job, or turn on line item durations in your settings if you have standard durations set up for your services.

Hi ProperGuy​ and travisshepherd​ 

Thanks for taking the time to lay this out in so much detail. The examples you shared really help illustrate the workflow you're trying to accomplish and, more importantly, why having duration available before a job is scheduled matters for your business.

At this time, Jobber doesn't have a dedicated estimated duration field at the job level that works in the way you've described—where you could enter the expected duration of an unscheduled job and have that information carry into tools like Find a Time when you're ready to schedule it.

Travis shared some helpful workarounds for managing this with the tools available today, but I also recognize that those still require additional manual steps and aren't the same as the workflow you're describing.

We really appreciate you sharing the use case behind the request. Understanding not just the feature someone is asking for, but how its absence impacts estimating, routing, scheduling, and managing a high volume of unscheduled work is incredibly helpful context for our team. I'll make sure this feedback is captured and shared.