Been following this thread for a while, trying to figure out if Housecall would be useful for our company, since at this present time most or work load is in route and commercial arena.
One of our main concerns is we do have multiple jobs under one heading with multiple locations. Like some are saying you can not ad pdf docs to estimates/invoice that could become problematic.
Are there any simple work around that i have missed?
Seem like a great service…
just curious, why is that relevant? i get that it’s not exactly accurate, but is it important to you to drill down into your month-by-month revenue that closely? i’m sure you have a good reason, as i’ve come to the conclusion (finally, after great deliberation) that you are no dummy. 
didn’t realize that. looks like using the customs tags is going to be the way to go for now, at least with regard to tracking. and placing the actual job address in the notes maybe, so the guys can route themselves?
jobber and hcp need to mate
jobber is still more powerful and more useful to me than hcp. I’m literally using both right now. Hcp mainly for the marketing and follow ups, for now. I figure this way, at least my customer db will be in and updated for if/when I make a full switch over. This is when hcp hopefully catches up to jobber where needed.
what are the things you like better in jobber? it’s been about 18 months or so since i checked it out so i’m sure a lot has changed.
They haven’t pushed a lot of new features out in awhile to be completely honest. But everything jobber does, it seems to do better and with more options. HCP seems to push out features, but no customization comes with them. Can’t edit notifications, can’t edit emails and postcards much (no html, bold, hyperlinks, no custom template for back of postcards).
HCP notifications - I hate how you can’t edit what they say. Don’t like the invoice/email layouts either. Even the visit reminder pulls the same clunky service/job description hcp uses and it’s meaningless. Clashes with custom job descriptions for calendar view too - see below.
I can’t stand the way HCP has job descriptions and services set up. Jobber is far better for this. “Window Cleaning” is the service, and the description is separate. HCP mates these two, and it bothers me. No consistency. Can add the quantity and unit price to equal a total, but can’t add quantity and total to make the unit price.
Jobber has a lot better financial tracking and reports. I love how jobber keeps track of who owes what, when, etc.
Jobber let’s me make custom colors for the calendar, custom descriptions, etc. It’s all silly, I know… but it makes life a lot easier. Being able to have a simple “20D” (for example - 20 windows, deluxe package) in the job description appear on the calendar is nice for glancing at while scheduling. I know hcp just added ‘some’ options for calendar description, but it won’t even allow me to have the “20D” unless I add that to the job description/work order.
Very incoherent examples, but it’s just hard to pinpoint all of them. But when you run in to them, they bug.
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Even the things you guys are talking about, jobber does. Can schedule multiple visits for the same job, and can add attachments to estimates/bids.
But there are also things hcp does that jobber doesn’t. Mind you they are basic with no customization, but they work… kinda. I like text notifications, and I like the email/postcards campaigns.
They both need notifications for specific triggers though. I would love to have triggers, like a notifcation on dashboard if its been x amount of time since service. Makes following up and keeping track of customers a hell of a lot easier to manage.
i remember not liking the way jobber handled job creation and completion. and it was really wonky with quickbooks. maybe i’ll give it another look while i have some time this winter.
Jobber’s workflow does take a lot more steps, I completely agree. Albeit annoying, we are talking an extra 10 seconds.
Faster on the web, more steps in the app.
Nothing is perfect, that’s why I wish jobber and hcp would mate… it would be very powerful
i’ve been saying that for a couple of years now. even TCF has great features that neither of these two has. super detailed reporting, daily revenue totals at a glance, very robust team management. too bad they cant just mind meld and create the perfect CRM
What was wonky about syncing quick books with Jobber? HCP syncs better in what ways?
I’m too simple of a person I prefer simple easy to get to lost in the weeds with to many options
i remember it had a terrible time syncing contacts. hundreds of errors. it took us days to sort it out. conversely, i sent a csv to HCP and they uploaded all my contacts for me, and i’ve had no sync issues since i connected to qbo.
also duplicate invoice numbers. it wasn’t smart enough to check quickbooks last entered invoice number and select the next one when creating an invoice. it would push a second invoice with the same number as one already created in qbo. nightmare. to be fair, HCP can’t do that either, but if there’s a duplicate it just won’t push at all. so at least it can’t screw up your qbo ledger.
i really want my crm to operate independently of qbo. i want to handle all invoicing and A/R exclusively through qbo, because it’s invoicing and tracking features are so much better, and that’s where the ALL the money is accounted for anyway. i remember Jobber made it exceedingly difficult to operate without using their full workflow all the way through invoicing and payment. hcp seems to make that a lot easier.
That’s a bummer, not sure why either crm’s would manage a one way push any differently.
Out of curiosity, is it important to keep the same invoice numbers, or to at least not have duplicates? I let Jobber do the invoicing. I don’t use qbo, but if I did it would only be for the tracking and reports. I rather let my crm track invoices as I feel they’re more tied together. I also track expenses through Jobber as well.
I’ve been thinking about syncing with qbo just for more robust tracking and reports, but honestly jobber does it all just fine so I don’t see the huge benefit.
the problem with tracking money in a crm is that it only tracks invoices and expenses. no payroll (and all of the associated red tape) and no tax info or reports, no online banking integration, all of which are critical to an operation with multiple employees. so it makes no sense to track half my numbers through one system and the other half through another. they need to be all in one place. quickbooks is designed to do exactly that.
and yes, duplicate invoice numbers are a disaster waiting to happen. imagine trying to accept payment on a duplicate invoice number and applying it to the wrong invoice on accident… and then reconciling your online bank activity… 
How does HCP’s online/instant cc payment options work out with QBO? Do you send the invoice from QBO, or HCP? I’m curious about how the whole HCP/QBO integration handles that aspect?
Maybe you could give me a quick run-down of your workflow between the two platforms; which tasks you do from either program?
I don’t currently have QBO, but I’d be interested in looking into it if I can retain the HCP online/instant cc options.
we run all invoicing, payments and banking through quickbooks alone. hcp handles scheduling, routing, customer notifications and job status (scheduled/in progress/completed) and email marketing/follow-up etc. basically, $= qbo. ops=HCP. quickbooks is so much better at handling numbers than anything else that in my mind it’s dumb (if you are going to use both a crm and qbo) to try to do it with anything else. it’s like trying to push a full shopping cart uphill in gravel when you have a four-wheeler sitting in your garage.
we’ll be using hcp’s built in job time stamping to feed data to a spreadsheet that will track per-job details: project, assinged to, total crew count, total man hours, job ticket, $ per man hour (which will tally total jobs performed for the month and spit out a $PMH average for that month), at least until HCP’s reporting features are built out enough that it will do that for us.
hcp’s payment system is clunky- it dumps a lump sum into your account at random, and then you have to go to their payments screen to see what invoices correlate with that lump payment (ie, you take four separate payments for four separate jobs on monday, on tuesday you get a deposit of the total $ amount for all four jobs. each payment does not deposit on it’s own individually). if you push to qbo, that lump payment shows as a deposit in your biz account, which you then go back through and reconcile with each invoice that got paid from that lump sum.
i think you if you want to combo the two, you are better off just taking payments through quickbooks gopayments. you’ll pay a little more in fees and it’s an extra app on your phone, but it eliminates all the matching up of payments to invoices and it meshes seamlessly with everything else you’ll already do in qbo. and then, if you are at your lapper or desktop in qbo, you can process payments right from the invoice screen the same way.
A lot of you guys have brought out interesting points with HCP, usually @HouseCallPro or @rolandal respond right away. Perhaps they have a long weekend off, or are working hard on implementing the suggestion we have made. I appreciate how they are always trying to improve their platform. I wish people from QBO were on here to listen to suggestions and to our gripes as well.
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Ok, thanks. I guess that’s the answer I was afraid of.
I’ve found the HCP payment system to be very user friendly on the customer’s side. It seems we get a high % of customers who pay their invoice within minutes of receiving it. I never experienced that when sending invoices with Square.
But I seriously need to get better with book keeping this year. I don’t even want to discuss my current convoluted methods…
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@rolandal @HouseCallPro,
One more feature request from me (and this one’s actually really important to me):
The ability to use our own email server. I’ve had a lot of customers who have had our HCP messages filtered into their spam or “promotions” folder.
And I have one customer in particular (an insurance agency) that can’t receive our invoices at all due to their strict email security system. But they can receive emails just fine from my own email address, with attachments and all.
I think what this thread is showing if anything is, those who use housecall really like it and we all see even more potential for it.
None of the other software platforms get the kind of discussion Housecall does.
But back to the original reboot of this thread 
@HouseCallPro @rolandal
Get the estimate feature fixed up 
