Plumbing Software

Buyers guide

Plumbing businesses are not exempt from the widespread digitalization transforming all industries. This digital wave has ushered in tech-focused customer expectations and increased competition due to operational advantages gained from using new systems.

As such, plumbers and plumbing business managers must invest in the proper technologies to stay competitive in their markets.

Fortunately, there's a vast market of field service management solutions that perfectly address the needs of different types and sizes of plumbing businesses. This Buyer's Guide will help software buyers trying to gain an understanding of this complex software market.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Plumbing Software?

Common Features of Plumbing Software

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Benefits of Adopting Plumbing Services Software

Market Trends to Understand

What Is Plumbing Software?

Maybe you're fortunate enough to have a few employees supporting your plumbing business—or perhaps you're going it alone. Either way, plumbing service software will help you get a better handle on your business as you execute on the dozens of daily operational responsibilities.

These field service systems help companies just like yours create work orders, assign appointments and manage employee schedules. These systems support optimized routing to direct drivers the best way to the next job, allowing them to do more work in the day and save on fuel costs. And service software often offers systems for recording, storing and analyzing valuable customer contact information and past work histories.

Common Feature of Plumbing Software

The most important features of plumbing software help newfound organizations grow. These systems typically support appointments and schedule management, work order creation and collection/storage of valuable customer data.

Beyond that, some plumbing service software also tracks plumbing equipment and parts inventory, both across the operation and even within each vehicle. This way you have an accurate idea where your tools are and if you need to order more equipment/parts to complete scheduled jobs.

Here's a detailed description of these functionality:

One particular feature of most plumbing software that you must acquire is GPS tracking. This capability infers having a tracking system that's either embedded into the vehicle or the plumber. These systems provide multiple, very tangible revenue boosting benefits that plumbing services can achieve.

A few of these include:

GPS tracking also enables managers to hold mobile employees/plumbers accountable for safe, efficient, and agreeable vehicle/driving usage.

What Type of Buyer Are You?

Before starting your research, it's important that you determine what kind of buyer you are. The majority of plumbing businesses looking for operational software fall into one of these categories:

Solopreneur/Owner: These are plumbers that own or "are" their business. They have straightforward needs that are addressed by a wide range of providers and would benefit greatly from automations and other software support.

Small business buyers: These plumbers work for small operations that are moving beyond Microsoft Outlook, Excel spreadsheets, and paper work order management. They realize the need to adopt software in order to grow/sustain the growth of their business.

Contract buyers: These are businesses that contract out plumbing work. They need all the core features but have additional needs for managing work orders for contract plumbers, maintaining communication with contract plumbers and tracking request customer satisfaction.

Enterprise buyers: These buyers work for large regional or national plumbing organizations. They may have multiple locations/franchises to manage and place a premium on integrations across all business units.

Benefits of Adopting Plumbing Services Software

These are the five key benefits of adopting plumbing services software. But in spite of these benefits, there is a significant potential issue plumbing service businesses might encounter when adopting new software:

Failed implementation and adoption. Businesses must do everything they can to effectively adopt and get employees using any new software. Change management best practices are a great place to start, and don't be afraid to lean on your software vendor for training.

Market Trends to Understand

Mobile service apps. Microsoft debuted their tablet PC version of Windows in 2001, and field service organizations (like plumbing businesses) haven't been the same since. Now mobile field service apps are available across all major mobile platforms for plumbing businesses to use in the field.

Mobile payment processes. One huge benefit of mobile payment processing is the ability to accept and process payments immediately upon completion of the job. This puts the money owed for work more quickly into the hands of the business rather than sending an invoice and waiting on the customer to submit payment.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Most all service software vendors for plumbers to consider now all offer cloud-based products, typically through a monthly subscription plan. This means you'll access and log into your system via internet connection or mobile data usage in the field. This is different than on-premise systems that you'd purchase and install totally on your own server.