Field service software for a one-van owner and for a ten-tech shop

At one van, you are the dispatcher, the front office, the technician and the bookkeeper. You answer the phone under a crawlspace. You write the invoice in the driveway. Nobody else needs to see your schedule, because nobody else is on it.

At ten technicians, those jobs split into people. A dispatcher moves jobs around when a part is late. A front-office person books calls and chases unpaid invoices. Technicians want to know where they are going next and nothing else. The software stops being a notebook and becomes the place where these people stay out of each other's way.

• A board that shows everyone at once, by day and by week, with drag to reschedule or reassign on desktop and tablet.
• Conflict warnings. When you put two jobs on one technician at the same time, you get a warning. You can still choose "schedule anyway", because sometimes you mean it.
• Roles. Admin, front office and technician see different things. A technician sees only the customers on jobs assigned to them and never sees invoices.
• Customer history and multiple addresses, so the person answering the phone knows who is calling and which property they mean.
• Photos on the job, so the next visit starts with what the last one found.
• Calendar feeds, so each technician can see their jobs in Google, Apple or Outlook calendar. Feeds are one way and read only. See calendar feeds.
• Reminders to customers 24 hours and 2 hours before, to cut no-shows. See appointment reminder emails customers read.

The daily routine for the person running the board is in the dispatcher daily checklist.

• Estimates are plain line items with no price book and no proposal tool.
• Recurring jobs repeat a visit on a schedule, but there is no separate service-plan billing.
• No route optimization. You order the day yourself.
• No Android app. The technician view works in a phone browser, and the iOS app is not in the App Store yet.
• A cap of 10 users, all roles included. Past that, CalSpark is the wrong tool.
• No QuickBooks Online sync, no text messages unless you connect your own Twilio account.

The one-van owner who wants a price book and the 10-person shop that wants QuickBooks sync both hit these walls first. The broader checklist is in what small shops need from field service software.