No, I don’t use TCF.
Have you looked at jobber?
Sent from my iPhone using Window Cleaning Resource
Don’t mean to be too self promotional, but I’m the co-founder of a company called HouseCall.
We have a product that is not only a CRM for window cleaning businesses, but also invoicing, estimates, dispatching, and CC payment (1.99% flat).
We have both a full featured mobile app, as well as web portal for when you’re in front of the computer.
Take a look at our website: HouseCall … you can also call me personally if you have any questions: 858-365-0850 …
Customer Factor. Excellent and Steve provides the absolute best customer service and is improving the product endlessly. I love it.
sorry Chris, I actually signed up to CF that day… I’ll take a look at Jobber as well. I do like the fact we get a WCRA discount with CF though, but I need to compare the two while I’m in my 30 day trial
There is a discount for HouseCall Pro as well… working on making it more official with the admins, but feel free to email me: [email protected] for a 50% discount.
-R
fwiw, i used jobber for six months. ran two-three crews of of it, processed invoices, scheduling, etc. i ended up bailing on it for a couple of reasons.
- there was no daily sales tally display: it was really difficult to see how much revenue you had scheduled for each day. that’s a bummer, because i try to build my schedule around a target gross sales/day/crew goal. there was no way to see how much $ in work i had scheduled for a given day at a glance. (TCF has this built in on the calendar view- each day has the day’s scheduled $ amount dispalyed)_
- no way to set up crews. you have to schedule each employee individually to a job. it’s annoying and counterintuitive. there are some workarounds but they are clunky.
-there’s really no way to bypass the invoice end of it. you can’t finalize a completed job without producing an invoice and then marking it paid after you get paid. i invoice through quickbooks online because it’s so robust and i like the way the invoices look. sure, you can sync invoices from jobber over to quickbooks, and then send the invoice from quickbooks, but it’s an extra step and i found that the syncing was very prone to errors. the other way is to just send invoices directly from jobber and just rely on the sync to send the numbers over to quickbooks, but the invoices and features attached to those invoices in jobber just arent as attractive as quickbooks online.
-no offline mode (big problem with most cloud-based crm’s- i believe the same goes for TCF. quickbooks online is obviously useless when offline as well)
so, although there were some great features in jobber, there were just a few deal breakers for me.
i’m going to give TCF another go. i may also look into housecall
Thanks c_wininger I was wondering about a couple thigs you touched on.
I’d kill to have a downloadable software and maybe pay for updates or something.
I actually came here to see what was up with Housecall, if anyone had any experience.
So, it looks like you have a couple interested party’s [MENTION=38534]rolandal[/MENTION] (you have the floor.)
Happy to answer any questions [MENTION=1736]JfromtheD[/MENTION] - HouseCall Pro is the easiest and modern way to run you window cleaning business.
I’ve been talking to several forum members, and looks like the ability to:
- Sign off on invoices digitally
- Assign/tag customers to routes to dispatch to employees
- Web booking widget (similar to Responsibid)
- Automatic 6 (or X) month email reminders
are important to your businesses. Those will be coming up on our roadmap and complete in the next 4-6 weeks.
Currently we are finishing our Quickbooks integration and Google Calendar integration, which will be done next week.
Let me know if there are other things that you think TCF or others are lacking that you’d like to see us build in HouseCall Pro 
Crew setup/assign- that was something that stood out, for me.
yes- easily customizable crews, and daily sales totals at a glance in calendar view. and invoicing features that are optional and easily bypassed. that’s what i’m looking for.
Question about your Crews…
Do they change often? ex. Imagine 4 employees: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Epsilon
Alpha Beta are Crew 1 Gamma Epsilon are Crew 2
All of a sudden you switch Alpha to Crew 2 and Gamma to Crew 1??
Or are you just looking to be able to sign multiple employees to a current job? Or would you like to assign Crew 1 to a job…
What if you switch the people in Crew 1, what happens to the currently assigned employees to the job. Do they change for that one too, or only going forward?
Take a look at HouseCall Pro: Home Services Business Software - Housecall Pro … it’s a Mobile app and also Web portal to help you manage everything from CRM, to invoicing, to dispatching, and automatic CC payment (1.99%)
yes! at least for me, crews and their composition can change daily. it just depends on the size, location or nature of the job for any given day. it just makes sense to me that if you were to implement a crew building feature, it would be easily adjustable on the fly.
how i envision it is that each “crew” would really be sort of a color coded module containing employees. if changes were made to the module, that would be reflected on the schedule. the crew module would take precedent over the individual. the module would remain the same until it was tweaked again. custom modules could be built and then selected from a pool and placed on the schedule. imagine alpha, beta and delta all work tuesday through friday together. but alpha and beta both work saturdays, and delta doesn’t. you could make a custom crew module containing only alpha and beta, which could then be placed on the saturday schedule.
^how’s that for an armchair software developer!
i could see this being the case for a lot of service based business. for instance, part-time workers. they would tend to be part of a crew, but not always present for that particular crew. that could create problems if you had a fixed crew and tried to assign them to a particular job. “is the part-time worker on duty with his crew today? or is he not?” and so forth… i’m sure you see what i’m getting at.
Yeah, I was talking to Roland about this. How I believe it could be implemented is that you assign “routes” to the employees. You label each area with a route name, then assign that name to the employee. So if 2 employees have the same route, they share the commission.
If they’re only doing 1 or 2 houses per day, this isn’t a big deal. But if they’re doing 50 jobs a day in route, it becomes a HUGE deal. Especially if you’re tracking commission.
that would be a good idea, but i think it would need to be a separate functionality. it would be nice if the software could be flexible enough to schedule based on a route and based on crews concurrently, and then alert you if there were conflicts, for instance “alert: worker A is assigned to crew X and Route Y at the same time. Please adjust!”
It seems like HouseCall is similar to Angie’s List, in some ways. They have an app for homeowners and an app for businesses, and function as sort of an intermediary. Not sure I’m understanding this correctly. This is from the app for homeowners…
Hey Michael -
Yeah you understand that correctly. Except for it’s free for homeowners, and there is no listing/advertising fee for professionals either!
HouseCall Pro is the app & web portal that professionals use to run their business.
HouseCall, is a booking app, that homeowners can use to request professionals services. This comes as a feature which you can enable or disable (although most companies using [URL=“http://www.tryhousecall.com/pro”]HouseCall Pro tend to value being ahead of the rest of the market/competition).
It’s very similar to a Responsibid installation, but not for the web. HouseCall is purely mobile, and now that people have an app for almost anything, they can book you straight from an app. Your existing customers will only see you in your category (ex. windows & exterior).
Hmm. Not sure I’m comfortable surrendering control of the customer experience in that way, and setting myself up to communicate with them primarily through an intermediary.
