Equipment / asset history per unit: how are you handling it today?

Question

I've seen a few threads asking for equipment tracking in Jobber (model, serial, install date, warranty, and service history per unit). I'm curious how people are working around it today:

- Custom fields on the property?

- Nameplate photos attached to visits?

- A separate spreadsheet or app?

- Or does it mostly live in your techs' heads?

And a second question: what would matter more to you

(a) giving the customer a history report for their unit, or

(b) getting a list of who's due for maintenance, whose warranty is ending, or whose 12+ year-old unit is ready for a replacement quote, so you can book the work?

Transparency: I'm a founder building an add-on in this area, and I want to build what you'd actually use, not what I assume. Not linking anything here. If you'd be up for a quick 15-minute chat about how your shop handles this, just reply here and I'll reach out.

Thanks!

travisshepherd · Answer

You are hitting on a major gap in Jobber that maintenance and service shops deal with every day. Jobber does not have a native asset or equipment tracking module, so everyone is forced to patch together their own workarounds.

Most shops rely on custom fields at the property level for basic stuff like model, serial number, and filter sizes, combined with techs attaching photos of the nameplate and equipment tags to the visit notes. For a quick look while on site, that gets the job done. The problem is when a property has multiple units or a long history, searching through years of attached photos and visit notes to find one specific service event becomes a massive time waste.

Some guys use custom fields for single-unit properties and push everything else into spreadsheets or secondary apps to track replacement cycles and warranty dates, but keeping two separate systems updated always falls apart when the schedule gets busy.

To answer your second question: option B is where the actual money is made.

Giving a customer a printed history report is nice for building trust, but getting a proactive list of equipment reaching the 10 to 12 year mark, expiring warranties, or upcoming maintenance cycles directly turns old data into booked work. Generating replacement quotes and recurring preventive maintenance from asset age is what actually pays the bills.

If your add-on can pull that data out of Jobber and hand us an actionable list of who needs a replacement quote or a maintenance visit without forcing double entry on every job, that solves a real operational pain point.

abdul_unittrail · Answer

Thanks Travis, this is really helpful, especially the point about multi unit properties and years of photos becoming impossible to search.

I totally agree on double entry being the deal breaker. The idea I'm testing is: the tech snaps one photo of the nameplate the first time they see a unit, and after that every Jobber visit at that property gets linked to it automatically, so no re typing.

Question for any shop owners reading: would your techs actually do that one photo per unit? Or does anything that isn't already inside Jobber's visit screen just get skipped?

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Equipment / asset history per unit: how are you handling it today?

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