Best practices for service contracts and multi day jobs?
Hello! How are you entering and keeping track of service contracts? We sell, install and service generators and want to make sure we are properly tracking these and ensuring renewals don't slip through the cracks. Some are once a year visit, some need 2 visits, some need 4. How do you guys do this? What about jobs that require multiple visits? Our installs take time from the moment we get the project approved, to then getting the permit approved, and the individual days of work, inspections, etc. Looking for tips on this. Thanks!Why Every Service Contractor Needs to Understand Material Markup (Not Just Job Markup)
Some home service contractors love to mark up the entire job, and that’s fine until you realize you’re not really making money on your materials. For me, personally I love to know ow everything is divided in my margins... Because It covers all the costs that get overlooked: Warranty replacements that eat into profits Time to grab, stock, or return parts Fuel and vehicle wear from sourcing Credit card fees and supply chain risk When you don’t separate material markup, you lose visibility. If you’re inefficient in your labor or your jobs start dragging, you won’t know where the leak is. Understanding markup on material is one of the most vital fundamentals for any service provider. It’s what separates a day to day contractor from a profitable one. That’s why we built this quick resource for you: It breaks down: ✅ How to calculate markup by cost range ✅ What markup really covers (overhead, risk, and time) ✅ Why materials should always be treated as a profit center, not just a pass-through expense Download the worksheet, walk through it with your team, and start identifying where your leaks are. Let me know what you think.Real Reason Most Contractors Don’t Know Where the Leak Is (How to Price)
Just returned from the Masters of Home Service Podcast with Adam and we broke down something every contractors pain point... Most of us think our pricing problem is about charging more. But in reality, it’s about not knowing where the leak is. That’s why I built the Pricing Blueprint Worksheet, it forces you to look at every category inside your business: Is your hourly cost set right? Is your team milking jobs or burning hours? Is your overhead eating too much of your margin? Are your profit targets too low? Or are you just lost trying to figure out where it all goes? When you separate these categories, you finally see where your money ends up. You’ll know if it’s a labor problem, an overhead problem, or a leadership problem. This is exactly what we talked about on the podcast, that transition from employee mindset to owner mindset. Thank you Jobber Team for the opportunity. Here is the sheet we went over and let me know your thoughts.
Looking to collaborate with Junk removal, landscape or cleaning companies.
Hello Jobber world, I am a small Canadian owned and operated pest control company operating in Toronto, Ontario. I am putting this message out to try to get in touch with a small commercial cleaning, landscape and junk removal company to share some work. Also open to creative ideas also, pressure washing comapnies, HVAC, construction, lawn care...anything we can do as small business owners to share the work. My business model is a full service pest control company, and all three of these services are going to be offered to my customers due to the importance of each. I plan to do most of it myself at the beginning, but would like to have some other local Canadian owned small business owners to share work leads. I do not want to work with a large operation to outsource work because I am a huge believer in owner/operated businesses, hence why I (and likely yourself) started my own business I would love to hear from anyone reading this and you can email me anytime at pestfreecanada@gmail.comAdd Category & Subcategory Structure to Pricebook Items for Faster Field Quoting
We’d love to see Jobber’s pricebook evolve to include Category and Subcategory fields that can be used to organize services and products within quotes and invoices. Currently, line items can only be classified as “Service” or “Product.” This flat structure makes it difficult for technicians in the field to quickly find the right line item when quoting or invoicing on site. Other trade service platforms (like Housecall Pro) allow items to be uploaded with a “Category” and “Subcategory,” which can then be used to filter or browse within the app. Adding this capability to Jobber would make a major difference for trades with large or detailed pricebooks — especially electrical, HVAC, and plumbing contractors. Example use case: Our team is building a standardized pricebook with over 1,000 items. If we could categorize items (e.g., Devices → Switches → Single Pole or Breakers → AFCI → 20A), our field techs could easily quote small jobs or extras on the spot without relying on estimators. This would: Reduce office workload by enabling accurate in-field quoting and billing Improve efficiency and consistency across the team Buy back time for company owners and estimators to focus on higher-value tasks Suggested Implementation: Add optional “Category” and “Subcategory” fields to the pricebook import/export template Allow field staff to filter or browse line items by category when adding items to quotes or invoices This would be a huge workflow improvement for growing teams trying to scale quoting in the field while maintaining accuracy and consistency.What is the biggest bottleneck for you as a blue collar trade owner?
Hey what's up if we've never met, my name is Jeff aka "The 360 Electrician" or @the360electrician on all social media. I coach over 1000 electrical contracting and blue collar businesses and have been a Jobber ambassador for well over 2 years now. I run 2 electrical contracting companies for the past 20 years. I'm located in California and Montana, so you better believe I have the experience to help anyone from 0 to 360. After talking to hundreds of you in my 8 week contractor playbook course, time and time again the topic of the "unknown" comes up. Most of you want to grow your business, you are booked solid, you know there is a shortage in the trades but the unknown of being the "boss" is what holding you back. I have 3 tips that may help you with this and I hope you will reach out if you have any questions or need a more comprehensive hiring system. Hire before you need to hire - Don't wait till it's too late. If you know you need help start looking NOW! Otherwise you hire out of desperation and trust me, that's a recipe for disaster. Make sure you aren't hiring to fill a spot, but rather to buy back your time. This is based on the best seller from Dan Martell "Buy Back Your Time". When you can step away from the tools, you change the game as far as your business goes. You can hire anyone qualified to cut the grass, or install an electrical panel, you can't just hire anyone to run your business and take care of the finances taxes etc. Freeing up your time is PRIORITY 1 so you can grow. Own the trains don't run the trains. Hire 24/7 always hire better, more qualified employees. Make sure you have a Win-Win / profit sharing system in place and you will keep employees longer and happier. Constantly losing good employees takes time to retrain and trust so don't lose good people, reward them to stay. Need more tips, check out what we offer at http://www.The360Electrician.com and you can always email me at mailto:jeff@the360electrician.comProgress Payments
I’ve been running into something with Jobber that I’m curious if other contractors are struggling with too. Jobber seems mainly designed around industries like pest control or lawn maintenance — companies that don’t usually run really high line item prices or multi-stage projects off a single quote. For trades like mine (electrical contracting), projects are often big and spread out — think full home rewires, panel changes with remodels, or multi-phase installs. On those kinds of jobs, you can’t realistically bill everything upfront. We need to take progress payments as the work moves along. Here’s what I’ve been forced to do: Create a quote for the full project and get the client to approve it. Save the quote, don’t schedule it. Start the job and then build separate invoices for progress payments. The problem is that this really messes with the books. Jobber ends up showing the full approved quote plus all the separate invoices and payments. That doubles the client value and makes reporting messy. It also makes it harder to show the client a clear record of what’s been billed versus what’s left. My idea for a fix: Add a “progress payment” option to quotes/jobs/invoices — basically the same way deposits work now. On a quote or job, we could set a deposit, and then later go back in and log progress payments against the total without closing the job. That way the system would track everything cleanly, clients could pay stage-by-stage, and we wouldn’t have to hack around the software to make it work. Also while I’m at it — one other small request: on desktop we can add text-only line items to quotes, which is amazing for breaking them into sections or adding explanations. On mobile, we can’t. It would be a huge time-saver if that feature was available in the app, too. So — is anyone else having this problem with progress payments in Jobber? Would this kind of solution help your business too? – TJ Maddock Odinson Electric, LLCHow do you measure crew productivity?
I know Jobber has the employee productivity report. It doesn't work great for a company that has a ton of recurring jobs with fixed billing. I'm curious how people are measuring their crew performance. There are so many ways to track it. Budgeted hours vs actual, revenue per hour worked, jobs completed, visits completed - the list goes on. Curious to know what works for you and your team. What metrics do you look at to gauge crew productivity?
