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.