Feature lists are designed to look identical
Every product in this category claims scheduling, job management, invoicing, mobile access and reporting. They are all telling the truth, and the list tells you nothing, because the differences are in how each of those works rather than whether it exists.
A better approach is to take two or three jobs you actually did last month, including a messy one, and walk them through each candidate end to end. The product that handles the messy job without a workaround is the one to shortlist.
The questions worth asking
These expose more in ten minutes than a demonstration does in an hour.
- What happens when a job needs a part that is not on the van? Walk the whole path, including how the customer is told and how the second visit is booked.
- How does a technician record a variation agreed on site, and how does it reach the invoice?
- Can I see every finished job that has not been invoiced? If not, that money is invisible by design.
- Where do readings go, and can I see them for one unit across two years?
- What can each role see? Specifically, can a technician see only their own work, and can a finance person see money without seeing the schedule?
- How do I get all of my data out, in a usable form, if I leave?
- When something goes wrong at eight on a Monday, who do I speak to, and what have other customers' experiences been?
Technicians decide whether it succeeds
Software chosen by an office and imposed on a field team fails more often than it succeeds, and it fails quietly: records get filled in minimally, the schedule stops being trusted, and within a year the business is running on the software and on a parallel set of phone calls.
Put a candidate in front of your most sceptical technician and watch them complete a job on it. If it takes longer than what they do now, it will not be adopted no matter what the office prefers. Time on site is the currency, and anything that spends more of it than the old way has to deliver something visible in return.
Your data is yours, in practice as well as in principle
Ask specifically: can you export every customer, every job, every invoice and every attachment, in a format somebody could actually use, without asking permission? Vendors who answer this vaguely are telling you something.
This matters more than it seems at purchase time, because the whole value of years of service history is that you keep it. Data you cannot extract is data you are renting.
Ask what happens when you grow
Products are frequently chosen at one size and used at another. Ask how pricing changes as technicians are added, whether roles and permissions get more granular or stay flat, and whether anything about the product assumes a single location or a single currency.
The specific trap is per-user pricing that is comfortable with four technicians and punitive with fifteen, discovered at exactly the moment the business is investing in growth and least able to absorb a surprise.
Fit beats breadth
Generic field service products serve many trades and are necessarily shallow on the specifics of any one. For HVAC the specifics are not cosmetic: refrigerant records per system, equipment-level service history with readings, certification tracking, maintenance contracts that generate their own visits.
A product that handles those natively will beat a broader one where each is a custom field somebody has to remember to fill in. Custom fields are where good intentions go to be forgotten.