Find the best Moving Company Software

No matter how you slice it, moving is never a great experience. Packing up and transporting everything across town or across the country is stressful. But for moving companies, it's should be just another day on the job—not a stressful experience.

Specialized moving company software greatly increases a business's ability to deliver positive experiences to their customers. But there's a lot of software on the market for moving businesses, and choosing the best system for your business can be a difficult task. That's why we've put together this Buyer's Guide to help you determine the key features and capabilities you need in your new system.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Moving Company Software?

Common Features of Moving Company Software

Benefits and Potential Issues With Moving Company Tools

What Is Moving Company Software?

For moving companies, the actual transportation of customer goods is the “easy" part—not that moving antique pianos across the country is easy. It's just that from an operational point of view, there's a lot that goes into the actual business processes both before and after the move. As such, moving company software includes all the capabilities of fleet management software plus specialized features to automate and increase efficiencies across most tasks in the life cycle of a moving job.

These solutions typically include common capabilities such as:

• Appointment scheduling

• Job/work order management

• Job estimator and supplies calculator

• Contact management

• Accounts receivable and payable

These capabilities can support moving companies from the beginning of a job, through to its conclusion. Moving company software may include marketing capabilities that help you engage and build relationships with prospective customers. Some systems also offer sales management to help moving businesses close deals with potential customers.

Upon acquisition of a job, scheduling capabilities help ensure that appointments are accurately assigned and businesses have movers available. Services that provide online scheduling can even automate the process.

Example of a moving schedule in Moverbase

Job costing calculators and space estimators help provide a ballpark price range for customers. Some systems even offer automatic reminders and notifications for employees and customers.

Once appointments are scheduled, moving company software offers features to ensure the job is completed efficiently and accurately. Features supporting the day-of job include truck routing and GPS tracking, as well as mobile asset monitoring and mobile payment processing for once the job is complete.

These moving systems also provide reporting and analytics. This data analysis and reporting functionality can help moving companies establish and track performance metrics, which provide valuable and actionable insights into the health of the company. Dashboards and other detailed reports can also highlight areas where a company is flourishing or where it is struggling.

Common Features of Moving Company Software

Supporting these core capabilities of moving software are several features, including:

Benefits and Potential Issues of Moving Company Tools

The primary benefits of adopting moving company software and tools are the improvements in organization and efficiency that they provide. Moving company systems featuring customer and work order management offer visibility into all happenings in the business. This transparency enables you to go from a broad snapshot of the business down to a detailed description of each individual job.

In addition to improving organization at a broad level, these systems can greatly improve the efficiency of a moving company's operations. The ability to automate marketing and customer acquisition outreach can save moving company operators from having to heavily invest time and resources in a formal marketing team. And work order management capabilities can remedy the tedious paper trail of traditional work orders.

These process-based benefits are matched by the detailed reporting that moving company software can provide. While work order management features provide transparency into day-to-day operations, reporting and analytics capabilities generate easily understood reports on performance. These reports can be used to establish and monitor set metrics to gauge the success of the business.

While all these features are highly beneficial to moving companies, it's important to realize that not all software systems include these capabilities. Most moving company software will include at least basic scheduling features, but not all moving systems will feature customer-facing capabilities. Likewise, reporting and analytics capabilities will vary in terms of breadth, detail and ease of use from system to system.

Companies that have a system without any of these highly valuable features should look to integrate with existing customer management systems, reporting and analytics tools, or other relevant software.

Scalability is another potential issue that moving companies will want to keep in mind. It would be great to find a system that has all the necessary features for current daily operations. But where will the business be in the next two to five years? Increased company growth will likely require more specialized capabilities. It's best to find a system now that could scale to offer these more advanced features down the road as the company grows.