Owning, running, or working in a service business can get hectic. If you want to get better about scheduling jobs, managing clients, sending quotes and invoices, and getting paid for your work, take a good look at Jobber. This platform gives you the perfect tools to manage all of your jobs and blow your clients away with exceptional customer service. It will even help you take care of a bunch of things related to day-to-day operations.
Jobber: The Good and the Bad
We’re big fans of Jobber’s capabilities. The software delivers convenient benefits for customer management, invoicing, dispatching field workers, and a whole lot more. Field service providers can get a lot out of this solution, just be mindful of how much some plans can cost in order to unlock key features.
What Jobber Is Good At
Jobber excels at streamlining all the crucial elements of running a field service business. With fantastic built-in client management and communication features, calendars, and booking tools, you can get everything you need to elevate your business and the quality of your field agents’ service.
Pleasant, intuitive user experience
The simplicity of the Jobber software’s interface immediately impressed us when we first logged in. It’s clean, sleek, and easy to navigate, with a primary dashboard clearly displaying your appointments for the day front-and-center.
A sidebar menu contains everything else you need, with sections for managing schedules, clients, requests, quotes, active jobs, invoices, and more.
We appreciate how this UI makes your workflows feel smooth and efficient. Getting acquainted with the many features can take some time. But, once you get into the rhythm of jumping between sections in Jobber, using the software quickly becomes a breeze.
The theme of pleasant UI and UX extends to the Jobber mobile app as well. You get all the functionality you need to manage key parts of your field service workflow, no matter where you are.
Access quoting, scheduling, invoicing, payment collection, and communicating with customers—all from the convenience of your mobile device. At a glance, you can see your workflow progress and upcoming appointments.
This allows you to oversee your field operations and make timely business decisions whether you’re on the road, at a job site, or anywhere else your work might take you.
Helpful push notifications alert you to schedule changes, new requests, messages from clients, and quote views so that you can take action right away.
When a new service request comes in, the app makes it easy to quickly schedule the job directly from your mobile device. For last-minute job requests, view your team’s schedule on a map to swiftly assign service tasks to a rep based on their location.
Field workers can create and send professional quotes before even leaving a client’s home. Custom text messages alert clients when your crew is on the way. Field crews can send these templated texts in just a couple of clicks. The mobile app also lets your team clock in and out to capture time spent per job for accurate time tracking and job costing.
Between a pleasant desktop interface and a powerful mobile app that enables you and your workers to stay on top of jobs from anywhere, the overall UX is a major virtue of Jobber.
Streamlined quote and invoice management
Jobber is designed to simplify and improve the way you manage jobs, from the initial service request all the way through to getting paid.
When a customer contacts you needing service, whether via your website, phone, email, or in-person meeting, Jobber centralizes all their information and the specifics of their request. You can easily schedule an on-site assessment or generate a professional quote while viewing the request in the software.
Jobber quotes let you itemize pricing and include optional add-ons before sending it to a client with one click.
Once the quote is accepted, Jobber pulls all the information seamlessly into the job record. You’ll know the moment a quote is approved so you can move forward confidently with the job. All that’s left is to schedule the job on the platform’s native calendar, whether it’s a one-time gig or a recurring service commitment.
If one of your field reps wants to build and deliver a quote on-site, it’s equally easy to build one on the Jobber mobile app.
Jobber quotes become interactive once sent. Customers can visit your client-facing hub to review and approve quotes, pay a deposit, request modifications, and electronically sign quotes and agreements.
Invoicing is equally smooth. For recurring and one-off jobs, simply generate the invoice upon completion by pulling in the job details and work done that’s already stored within Jobber. Send the invoice immediately via text or email with a tap. Customers can conveniently pay online through Jobber or your field workers can accept payments in person.
For recurring work, invoices can be automatically created and charged using Jobber Payments.
And, for one-off invoices, you’ll never miss a due date again with handy, in-platform reminders of when it’s time to invoice each job, whether that’s monthly, upon completion, or on your preferred schedule.
You can also get paid faster with automated invoice follow-ups (including email and text message-based nudges to pay outstanding debts) and batch multiple job invoices at once to save yourself a lot of time.
Getting paid
Invoicing is only one half of ensuring that you’re getting the cash that your work has earned you.
One of the best ways to make sure you get paid for your jobs is by offering flexible payment methods to your customers. Jobber makes that easy through an array of options.
Payment processing is included on every plan, letting customers pay with a credit card or ACH payment (the latter being only available to customers in the United States) through your Jobber account’s built-in client portal. There, they can also file their card for automatic payment of recurring services.
Or, you can collect payments on the job site before your representatives leave. Jobber offers its mobile card reader for swiping debit and credit cards while in the field, plus you can have reps accept cash and input the payment manually into Jobber via the desktop and mobile apps.
Another huge benefit is that you get funds in your account lightning fast. Jobber offers instant payouts, so you have access to funds mere seconds after a customer pays online, even on weekends and holidays. With online payments made through Jobber, you’re still getting paid four times faster than you would while waiting for checks to clear.
Booking and scheduling
True to its mission, Jobber can make your customer service better through convenient job booking and scheduling features.
Customers can conveniently book appointments on your website at any time of day, and Jobber lets you set up service availability parameters so they can accurately self-schedule appointments. Customers only see services, times, and dates that you make bookable.
Place this booking form on your website, social media, client portal, or anywhere prospects may find it to more effectively generate new work. Within it, you can describe the services you offer in detail, including estimated or average duration and itemized pricing.
The booking widget updates your team’s availability in real time so that Jobber can automatically place customer bookings on your calendar without messing up your existing schedule or requiring manual corrections.
Since you can set individual team member availability (as well as status or job speciality) in Jobber, the software can also automatically assign the right person to each new job booking.
Customers receive professionally branded confirmation emails, while you get notifications of new bookings instantly.
Whether you’re mostly relying on this widget for booking or you field job inquiries through a combination of online channels, phone calls, and in-store visits, Jobber also makes it easy to organize and stay on top of your schedule.
Its centralized calendar tracks every appointment so you can accurately visualize your team’s workload.
If you need to manually add appointments, all it takes is clicking on the proper date in the calendar view, selecting a timeframe, and assigning a team member. You’ll be able to see staff availability and other job details while you build out new jobs. Plus, you can drag and drop appointments to reschedule them with ease.
You have five different calendar views to choose from and you can use color-coding and filters to keep job types organized and visually distinguishable from one another.
One great service-minded feature of Jobber is the map view. This plots your team’s active appointments so you can identify the most efficient routes and assign new rush jobs to whomever is closest to the client.
Any changes to the current day’s schedule trigger instant mobile alerts to the impacted employees, so everyone stays on the same page. Dispatch is made easy through these synchronized features and GPS tracking of your team.
Clients are kept informed of upcoming visits through automated appointment reminders by text or email, so they’re ready for your arrival.
Client management
Jobber goes well beyond a client portal and platform synchronization. The software’s client profiles make it function exceptionally well as a field service organization CRM.
Each client profile consolidates contact information, property or location info, previous work (including past invoices, services, and documentation), communication history, and any additional notes you’ve jotted down into one view.
Every communication with a customer gets logged for reference, from booking confirmations and follow-ups to on-my-way texts. This complete message thread reduces dropped balls and keeps service quality from slipping if assignments shift from one team member to another.
We’ve touched on some of the aspects of your workflow that Jobber can automate, like email reminders to customers who have an upcoming appointment or sending quotes and invoices when you move a job to the next stage.
For your existing customers, you can automate follow-ups after every job to thank them for their business, gather feedback, or request a public review. In the client hub, your customers are prompted to share booking links with their friends and family, so you never miss an opportunity to generate high quality leads.
And, with new lead tags applied automatically to customer profiles in the client section, you can focus follow-up efforts if you’re trying to win back an upset customer or attempting to warm up a cold lead.
Management of your financials
With Jobber’s real-time reporting and seamless accounting integration, you can manage your finances as easily as your workflow.
Since payments all happen within the platform—whether they’re made through the client hub or handled in person and manually entered—revenue is already front-and-center. Jobber also calculates your projected income, by taking into account what you’re charging for upcoming appointments.
Expenses can be logged as they’re incurred via the mobile app, and Jobber lets you attach photos of receipts to the log. Whether that’s gassing up vehicles, compensating subcontractors, or just paying for lunch, you can understand the true cost associated with jobs.
The software also keeps a list of your costs for each line item, so you can account for the material expenses associated with your work.
With all that information in place, Jobber can helpfully highlight your profit margins for each job and overall. The profit bar on each job displays its profitability, automatically calculated from the invoice total minus tracked costs.
You can generate financial reports—by job, multiple jobs, customer, service type, date range, or other factors—plus analysis of your overall income, projected income, tax responsibility, invoices, and more.
Syncing with QuickBooks Online keeps your books up-to-date automatically. Invoice and payment details transfer over so you never have to worry about data entry errors or duplication.
With automated tracking and reporting of all costs associated with a job, Jobber provides real-time visibility into everything related to your business’ financial health, giving you greater confidence to make decisions that maximize your profits.
Integrations
QuickBooks is just one key platform that Jobber can sync with. For one thing, you can enhance your payment collecting capabilities by integrating the software with Stripe, Square, PayPal Express, or Authorize.net.
Marketing becomes easier with some other clutch integrations. Sync Jobber with Mailchimp to send more effective emails to both prospects and existing customers, as well as managing Facebook and email-based ad campaigns.
Integration with Thumbtack and Google Local Services Ads help you boost your company’s visibility online and attract more new customers, while tying together Jobber with Broadly or NiceJob helps you foster customer relationships and generate reviews and referrals.
Syncing Jobber with FleetSharp for GPS tracking, CompanyCam for capturing photos and other details on job sites, and Chirp for multichannel communication can enhance your day-to-day operations and the efficiency of your workflow. You can even connect Jobber to FundBox to secure funding right within the software.
While the number of native integrations is limited, Jobber also plays nicely with Zapier, allowing you to connect the platform to over 1,000 other popular applications.
Jobber’s Potential Drawbacks
For all it can do, there are some limitations to Jobber’s features. By and large, this takes the form of essential tools being locked away on high-priced plans, but there are other aspects of the software that just flat-out disappoint some users.
Can get expensive
Jobber offers some of the most affordable plans in the field service management software category—at least on the lower tiers.
However, it can get expensive very fast if you’re dead-set on using some of Jobber’s advanced features. For example, you’ll only be able to tap into automated reminders and payments, QuickBooks Online integration, and online booking capabilities on the $129-per-month Connect plan.
On top of that, most plans are severely capped in terms of the number of users. Cheaper plans only allow for one user, while the aforementioned Connect plan has a maximum of five. You can add more users to most plans, but the $29 per month per extra user cost can quickly and massively inflate your monthly bill.
It gets even more expensive if you’re not willing to pay for a full year of Jobber up front. On lower-end plans, the jump isn’t too extreme, but the Connect plan goes from $129 per month to $169 per month if you opt for month-to-month billing.
Some users won’t be able to settle for the lower-cost plans that Jobber offers. If that’s likely your situation, be aware of how pricey this solution can end up being.
Some key feature limitations
Jobber, unfortunately, has a few imperfections with some of its useful features.
An inconvenient limitation is the inability to combine visits and jobs involving the same client into one entry or appointment. Needing to log these separately when you perform a site visit and the actual work in the same day adds tedious administrative work to a platform that generally reduces that sort of thing.
Some other issues include the inability to separate multiple individual contacts under a single client profile (making targeted follow-ups more difficult), no options for negative line items (making it tougher to apply discounts or prepayment credits), and limited text formatting capabilities and color options for categorization.
On top of that, there are a few important limitations on accepting and setting up payments in Jobber, which we’ll discuss separately.
Payment option constraints
We’ve already briefly mentioned one of these limitations—you’re only able to set up automated payments on select Jobber plans.
That can create several issues for users on lower-cost plans, chief among them the inability to set up recurring payments for customers getting routine service or maintenance from your team.
But the bigger issue isn’t one of a feature being locked away on the most expensive plans.
Partial payments are a pain in Jobber, plain and simple. Customers don’t have an option in their portal to opt for a payment any less than the full total due. Jobber does offer consumer financing on quotes with Wisetack. This allows the service provider to get paid in full, while the customers can select financing options directly in the quote.
Or, the service provider can split payments as a deposit on a quote, with the remainder on the invoice.
You can accept partial payments in the Jobber platform, but it requires you to enter a custom dollar amount in the software’s section for collecting payments. That can only work if a customer’s credit card is on file or you manually enter a cash payment made in person.
Regardless, if you manually enter partial payments, you’re also on the hook for communicating with the customer about their updated balance, due dates for the rest of the owed amount, and keeping a paper trail in case they skip out on the rest of the bill.
The manual requirements for handling partial payments can cause a lot of confusion and inconvenience, potentially leading to dissatisfied customers, even if you knocked the actual on-site work out of the park.
Jobber Plans and Pricing
Jobber offers four pricing plans for its field service management software. Pricing scales up to unlock advanced features and accommodate more users on a single Jobber account. Here are all the details about what Jobber costs to use.
Lite Plan
The Lite plan is Jobber’s most affordable option, starting at just $9 per month when paying annually ($19 per month on month-to-month billing).
It allows for only one user of the software. Unlike the plans above this one, you’re not able to bring in additional users for an extra fee.
This is a lightweight version of the Jobber platform. While several features are missing from this tier, you still get access to:
- Management of an unlimited number of clients
- Customer self-service portal
- Quotes and invoices
- Instant payouts
- Tipping
- iOS and Android mobile apps
- Digital, credit card, and ACH payments
- Mobile card reader
Online credit card payments incur transaction fees of 2.9% + 30 cents, while cards swiped on the mobile card reader incur fees of 2.7% + 30 cents. ACH payment fees are a flat 1%.
This entry-level plan enables solopreneurs and very small teams to get started with Jobber. It also extends unlimited email, phone, or live chat support to users and gives you access to Jobber’s entrepreneurial-minded private Facebook group.
While functionality is limited compared to the other Jobber plans, the low monthly cost of the Lite plan can make it attractive for early-stage service businesses looking for an affordable option to handle quoting, invoicing, payments, and basic CRM capabilities.
All Jobber plans come with a 14-day free trial to fully experience the platform. This allows small businesses to evaluate if the Lite tier contains enough helpful features and flexibility to be useful before committing.
Core Plan
The next step up is the appropriately named Core plan, which delivers most of the essential features baked into Jobber.
Priced at $49 per month when you pay for a full year up front, or $69 per month for monthly billing, this mid-tier option unlocks a wider range of features and tools that can benefit your field service business.
This is also the first plan that allows you to add authorized users to the platform for $29 per additional user per month.
The highlights of what you get on this plan include:
- Job scheduling (including calendar view)
- Job details and attachments
- Customer request tracking and management
- Automated customer referral requests
- Access to Jobber integrations on its app marketplace
- 20 built-in reports
One of the biggest benefits here is the ability to enable an online request form so site visitors and interested leads can ask for more information, a consultation, or the opportunity to set up an appointment.
Unlocking Jobber reports on your financials, workload, profitability, and more is another crucial addition. On this Core plan, you can do more for your customers while understanding more about the health and sustainability of your business.
Connect Plan
As we’ve mentioned earlier, the most useful plan for most businesses will be Jobber’s Connect plan. This is the first tier at which you can tap into some of the software’s most powerful features, such as:
- Job forms
- Team member routing and FleetSharp integration for GPS tracking
- Time and expense tracking
- Automated emails and text messages
- Online booking
- Automated payments, invoicing, and follow-ups
- QuickBooks Online integration
- Zapier integrations
- Custom fields
You’ll recognize a lot of those from the section earlier where we highlighted Jobber’s greatest virtues.
Notably, this is the first plan that allows your customers to book appointments online through a portal you place on your website or other digital properties. It’s also where a lot of the automation comes into play, from sending on-my-way texts to clients to putting the creation and sending of invoices and follow-ups on autopilot.
You’ll also get enhanced visibility into your profit margins, thanks to the included time and expense tracking and the ability to sync with QuickBooks.
This is Jobber’s most popular offering for a reason. There’s so much you can accomplish with this version of the software.
Pricing starts at $129 per month when you pay annually. That rate goes up to $169 if you choose monthly billing. Jobber’s Connect plan supports up to five users at no extra cost. Any users beyond that cost the standard rate of $29 per additional user per month.
Grow Plan
The Grow plan is Jobber’s premier offering and priced to match. Annual billing will mean this version of the software costs you $249 per month, but that rate will be a full $100 more if you opt for month-to-month billing.
In addition to everything included on the previous plans, Grow delivers:
- Built-in text message communication with customers
- Lead management supported by integrations with QuickBooks and Mailchimp
- Email and postcard marketing powered by Mailchimp
- Automated quote follow-ups
- Quote line item markups, add-ons, and images
- Job Costing
You can see that a few key features are enabled by integrations with other software, but the biggest benefits come from the ability to text clients from within Jobber (and receive replies) and the many ways you can enhance the quotes you send.
Quote add-ons make it easier for customers to select optional services when booking an appointment while markups let you dial in the prices you charge to keep your margins healthy. Adding images to line items can give you an edge over your competition by showing off your materials or the results of previous jobs.
The Grow plan allows you to have up to 15 users on the platform, which is usually enough for most teams to avoid paying the $29 per user per month charge of adding more.
For field service businesses managing a high volume of jobs and looking to enhance their sales and marketing tactics, the Grow plan’s capabilities are worth the expense. And, of course, you can explore this plan’s capability by utilizing Jobber’s 14-day free trial period.
Final Thoughts
Jobber is a potent solution for field service businesses looking to improve their overall management of work, scheduling, and clients. With a bevy of features that make life more convenient for your team and your customers, it’s a solid option as long as your company can stomach the price tag for accessing its advanced features.
