One of the places I feel like Jobber could improve the most is making service agreements more easy to administrate. It's a little chunky doing the re-occurring job thing. For those companies that have a lot of these, how are you guys doing in in Jobber?
We have service contracts that don't require a visit. Unfortunately, we've been seding those invoices through QuickBooks Online.
That's a case I hadn't thought about. With the invoices going out of QuickBooks, how do you know when one is coming due? Is there a date in Jobber for it, or does it live somewhere else?
The structure most people land on is a recurring job for the visits, a tag or custom field for the plan, and the renewal date typed in somewhere. That part works fine. The problem is none of those three talk to each other, so nothing tells you when something is about to go wrong.
D_LHerbier's second point is the one nobody answered and I think it's the bigger one. If the visit is scheduled a year out, the schedule is never going to remind you in time to actually reach the customer and move it. The reminder has to fire weeks ahead of the visit, not at it.
Renewals have the same shape. Once the agreement has lapsed it is too late to sell the renewal and you are just having an awkward conversation about price instead.
And if an agreement includes more than one visit a year, how many have been used versus how many are left is not something Jobber will surface for you. That is usually where the money goes. Somebody pays for four, takes two, and renews anyway. Or takes six and nobody notices.
For what it's worth I don't run a service business, I build integrations, so weigh the operator side of this accordingly. Those are just the three things that kept coming up when I looked at how people track this.
I agree. I am actually just finalizing a new service agreement type program for our company, and I have noticed the same thing. One thing we are trying to do is charge a flat annual fee for our program. I was surprised to find that there is no way to do an automatic reoccurring payment without connecting it with a visit. So we basically have to set up two reoccurring jobs, one for the actual visits to complete the work, and one just for the annual payment to come out.
It would also be nice if there was a way to get notified when a reoccurring job visit is coming up, instead of just relying on the schedule. When you have someone with an annual appointment, it is scheduled way in advance, so you have to reach out to them at least a week or two in advance to set to reset the date and time.
Try using Stripe and Zapier. Thats what we've done very successfully over the years. D_LHerbier
I have found countless things in the core functionality that are lacking in common sense, useful features, and third party solutions are likely the only option we have. The product is 15+ years old, so anything obvious that's missing is almost certainly the result of an ongoing decision not to add it.
SaaS products quickly shift focus to adding shiny new features to drive growth, ant the expense of base systems not being fixed or improved.
