Field service management software for small crews

The category covers any business that sends people to a customer's property to do work. Scheduling assigns the work. Dispatch gets the right person to the right address. Time tracking records what the labour cost. Job records capture what was done, usually with photos. Invoicing turns finished work into money owed, and reporting tells you whether the whole loop was worth running.

The gap in most tools is between the last two. Scheduling data is treated as if it were labour data, so reports are built on hours that were planned rather than hours that happened.

One-off jobs and recurring work in the same calendar, assigned to individuals or crews. Recurring work expands forward from a rule rather than being copied by hand, and a job carries its own address, access notes, and custom fields, so the crew has what they need without a phone call.

A map view shows the day's work geographically, which is how you notice that two crews are crossing the city to swap neighbourhoods.

Crews clock in and out from a phone browser. No app install, no company device, no per-seat licence for a seasonal hire. Location is captured at clock in and out and at job start and complete, with browser consent. There is no continuous tracking: knowing someone was at the right address at the right time is the useful signal, and following them all day is neither necessary nor welcome.

Checklists per job type so the standard is the same whoever shows up, with photos attached to the job. Disputes about whether work happened are the most common cause of a slow invoice, and a timestamped photo ends most of them in one reply.

Invoices are numbered sequentially per company with no gaps, which is what bookkeepers and auditors expect. Clients pay by card through a hosted link or by e-transfer, and either way the payment posts against the invoice so receivables stay in one place. Money moves through your own payment account, never ours.

Profit per job and per month, calculated from logged time entries rather than scheduled shifts. Receivables by age. Where the labour went. The point is not a dashboard with more charts, it is being able to answer "should I raise this client's price" with a number.

Three questions worth asking before you move your data anywhere. Does pricing scale with headcount, and what happens when you hire four people for a season? Does the crew need to install and log into an app, and who resets the password in March? And are the profit numbers built from time that was actually worked, or from the schedule?

If you are comparing against an established platform, the Jobber alternative page lays out where Settles is narrower and where it is cheaper. If you run mowing routes specifically, start with lawn care software.

Lawn care and landscaping, snow removal, residential and commercial cleaning, property maintenance, pressure washing, and general handyman work. Anything where a crew goes to a property on a repeating schedule and the labour hours decide the margin.