6 Best HVAC Estimating Apps for Construction & Service Businesses

Standalone HVAC Estimating Apps vs. Comprehensive HVAC Contractor Software

Standalone HVAC estimating apps and takeoff software—such as Procore and Esticom, for example—are designed to help you efficiently build estimates and manage bids. They are particularly useful for construction companies to speed up the process of quoting for projects, enabling them to:

• Upload digital plans

• Perform quantity takeoffs

• Adjust quantities, prices, and labor units

• Create and track change orders

• Manage documents and reports

• Work with project management teams during the bidding process

• Create professional-looking estimates and bid packages

While these solutions are often priced lower than full-service contractor software, and are certainly better than using manual processes (such as Excel sheets and handheld calculators), these estimating apps have a number of limitations. 

The main drawback is that they don’t tend to seamlessly integrate with the other apps you use to run your business—apps for scheduling, dispatching, work orders, billing, etc.—so you’ll need to use a range of other apps or software to meet those needs.

With estimating and takeoff software, you not only have to pay for multiple apps to accomplish these other key business workflows, but you’ll also spend tons of time learning how to use each of them separately and getting used to their unique interfaces. 

And since these apps don’t communicate with each other, you’ll have to input the same customer details, invoicing information, job parameters, and more, into each platform individually. This is an inefficient process that adds to your workload and can easily lead to small inputting errors that may cause major issues that affect your bottom line. 

And lastly, most HVAC estimating apps of this kind are specifically designed to present estimates to construction customers, rather than service customers. So, if your HVAC business has both construction and service divisions, you’ll need other estimating software tools for operating the service side of your business.

As a result of these issues, many HVAC contractors are opting to use holistic HVAC business software, like ServiceTitan, instead. 

The Advantages of Using Holistic HVAC Contractor Software For Estimating

By adopting comprehensive HVAC contractor software instead of a stand-alone estimating and takeoff solution, you can eliminate all of the workflow inefficiencies and error-prone processes discussed above. 

There’s no need to adopt tons of different apps (and learn each individual interface), because these holistic solutions have the majority of the tools you need in one platform. 

For example, ServiceTitan offers features to accomplish almost any aspect of HVAC job management, including:

• Call booking

• Scheduling

• Dispatching

• Memberships

• Customer Management (CRM)

• Quoting

• Invoicing

• Flat Rate Pricing

• Timesheets

• Payroll management

• Payments

• Accounting (with optional Intacct and QuickBooks integrations)

More importantly, you don’t need to enter and reenter the same job and estimate information into many different apps. Once it’s entered into the platform, that information is automatically populated into each subsequent step and workflow of carrying out a job (from requisitioning equipment and materials, to tracking inventory, to generating invoices and applications for payment, to recording financial information into your accounting software). This significantly improves workflow efficiency and reduces input errors. 

Furthermore, ServiceTitan offers the tools needed to manage estimates (and the processes surrounding estimating—scheduling, dispatching, etc.) for construction and service jobs. These different business divisions require different tools and operating procedures that standalone estimating apps generally do not support. 

Now, let’s look at how ServiceTitan’s estimating features work. 

How ServiceTitan Streamlines Estimating for HVAC Businesses 

To make things easy, we’ll first discuss our HVAC estimating features for serving construction customers, and then we’ll walk through our features for serving residential and commercial service customers.

HVAC Estimating Tools for Construction & Subcontracting Work

ServiceTitan helps to manage all of the key steps involved in construction estimating, including:

• Creating detailed estimates

• Requisitioning materials directly from the estimate itself

• Generating and communicating purchase and change orders

• Uploading photos to the project to share with your team and your customers

• Tracking and recording labor hours 

• Generating applications for payment and invoices

• Syncing with your accounting system

Managing this process begins with creating a new project that allows you to capture all of the relevant information for a job: customer/company name, address, job-site information, estimate number and date, start date, etc.

Our project-tracking page provides at-a-glance details for tracking project costs, as well as initiating key actions, such as changing the scope of the project, ordering materials, creating purchase order documents, and invoicing, for example, as shown in the image below.

From this screen, you can begin the process of building a customized estimate that takes into account your most up-to-date equipment and material pricing, as well as your inventory.

Your project managers and/or technicians can enter all relevant estimate information including:

• Measurements

• Materials and equipment needed

• Required permits

• Details about the work to be done

In addition, your team has the ability to upload images and video of the job site into ServiceTitan to document the work as it progresses, or to flag work that needs to be done in the future. These photos and images are uploaded into the cloud and can be instantly accessed by techs, customers, and even specific experts contracted to work on the project. This prevents the usual multiple emails and long phone calls, or even additional site visits, to discuss project specifications and approaches.

In addition, you can create custom task lists and organize them using different colors, allowing you to organize and plan your tasks for executing the project.

Once you've collected all the information you need for your estimate, you can save the document as a PDF and share it with your client.

Connecting Estimates to the Rest of the Project Management Workflow

Unlike standalone estimating apps, ServiceTitan uses all the information included in the estimate as a starting point for the rest of the construction project.

As soon as you have been awarded the project, for example, you can begin ordering equipment and materials by selecting items right from within your estimate, and initiating a requisition.

This begins a guided workflow for creating purchase orders, allowing you to select suppliers, order quantities, delivery locations, and other pertinent details. These purchase orders can then be sent to vendors with a few clicks in one of several formats.

Then, ServiceTitan continues enabling you to manage the rest of your project in a highly detailed and integrated way. Specifically, you can:

• Manage scheduling and dispatching of field technicians.

• Monitor your project’s status with real-time updates on the project overview summary pages, which include detailed financial reports for each period.

• Keep track of job costs, taking into account labor, materials, and other expenses, and compare budgeted costs to actual costs.

• Integrate approved change orders.

• Create payment applications and continuation sheets for general contractors.

• Generate invoices.

• Create payments and apply them to accounts receivable.

• Update accounts receivable using our integrations with the most popular accounting software (including QuickBooks and Intacct).

Compared to dealing with each of these individual processes manually, either on paper, or using multiple disconnected apps, ServiceTitan streamlines the construction project management workflow. It reduces time spent on transferring information between non-integrated platforms and avoids the potential input errors this can cause.

HVAC Estimating App Features for Residential & Commercial Service Jobs

Estimating for residential and commercial HVAC services requires a different set of estimating tools compared to construction projects.

For example, the following capabilities become particularly important in these contexts:

• Pricebook Management: The ability to maintain up to date, profitable pricing that’s reflected on all estimates.

• Mobile Estimate and Proposal Creation: The ability to quickly create estimates and proposals in the field to present to customers.

• Upselling Features: The ability to increase close rates and average ticket prices through multi-option proposals, offering customer financing, etc.  

ServiceTitan has a suite of tools that offer all of these capabilities and more.

Streamlined Pricebook Management

Creating accurate estimates and proposals in the field necessitates having up-to-date pricing. ServiceTitan offers a suite of features for pricebook management that make this easier than ever, including tools to:

• Organize pricebooks into categories for easy navigation.

• Keep prices up to date with individual item and bulk editing features.

• Use Dynamic Pricing to auto-update pricing according to customized parameters

Users can upload pre-existing pricebooks, build them from scratch, or leverage our Pricebook Pro add-on, where we curate and continually optimize a flat-rate pricebook for you. 

Either way, with ServiceTitan, your pricebook is easy to manage so you can keep your prices up-to-date, and your estimates priced correctly—without your techs having to even think about it.

Check out this article for an in-depth walk-through of our HVAC pricing features.

Efficiently Create and Present Estimates and Proposals From the Field or Office

When technicians need to build an estimate in the field, they can do so easily via our mobile app (compatible with Android and iOS devices) by leveraging a pre-built estimate template, or by building an estimate from scratch on the spot. 

They can simply select equipment from the appropriate part of the pricebook, which automatically pulls that item’s information into the estimate for the customer (including product details, images, pricing, etc.). 

Technicians can also compile multiple estimates into a Good Better Best proposal for residential customers, which helps to increase average ticket prices.

Alternatively, for shops that prefer office staff to build estimates (a common preference in commercial service work), the appropriate person back at the office can easily build an estimate via our desktop app based on the data that’s been collected and entered into the mobile app by whichever field technician assessed the job.

Then, to help improve close rates, our integrated customer financing tool allows you to offer customers financing options that can be approved in real time—reducing friction and allowing you to improve close rates.

Note: You can also accept payments in the form of a check or credit card to reduce the time it takes to get paid. 

ServiceTitan: Full-Service HVAC Software Including Comprehensive Estimating Features 

If you want to secure more HVAC jobs and improve the efficiency of your service, making the estimating process easier and integrating it into all your other working processes is vital for any commercial HVAC contractor or residential service business.

Using a standalone estimating app will boost productivity and efficiency compared to manual systems, but it won’t integrate with the rest of the HVAC software solutions and processes you use now (or may want to implement in the future to manage your projects).

ServiceTitan’s HVAC software provides comprehensive estimating features, as well as all the necessary tools to run the rest of your HVAC business.

Want to see how ServiceTitan works to streamline your HVAC business operations? Schedule a call to get a free, live, one-on-one walk-through of the features we describe throughout this article.

Other HVAC Estimating Apps

Procore

Procore describes itself as construction management software. It offers a range of features for HVAC techs whose businesses are primarily or solely construction-focused, including tools for: preconstruction, project management, training management, resource management, financial management, and analytics. 

If your business is mainly focused on construction, this may be worth looking into. If you’re a hybrid shop that also does residential, it likely won’t be the right tool for your business. 

Learn more about Procore here. 

FastDuct

FastDuct is one of several products created by the estimating and takeoff software company FastEST, which also has FastPipe—an estimating solution for pipework. This is an estimating-only solution with very specific uses. 

This type of solution has limitations. It is unlikely to connect directly to the other tools you use to run your business, but if you are on the lookout for an estimating-only solution, you can learn more about FastDUCT here.

HouseCall Pro

Housecall Pro is a mobile field service management solution for home service businesses. Similar to ServiceTitan, it offers a wide range of features outside of estimating, such as scheduling and dispatching, estimates, QuickBooks integration, and more. 

However, when compared to Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan offers:

• Deeper native pricebook functionality.

• Ability to drill down further into reporting metrics.

• Automated tagging features that help increase revenue.

• Gated work sequences and customizable forms to facilitate accountability across the organization.

• Offline functionality that allows techs to use our mobile app when out of cell service zones.

For more details on these differences, check out our in-depth comparison article:Housecall Pro vs. ServiceTitan.

Esticom

Esticom is a cloud-based takeoff and HVAC estimating software built for HVAC contractors. They offer a suite of features including auto count, linear measurements, design and plan markup tools, and more. However, since they’re an estimating-specific software, they don’t seamlessly connect estimating with the rest of project management. You can learn more about Esticom estimating here.

FieldEdge

FieldEdge offers a wide range of features like ServiceTitan, including functionality for quotes and invoicing, scheduling and dispatching, service agreements, and more. 

However, when compared to FieldEdge, ServiceTitan offers:

• Residential service businesses

  • Integration with Google Local Services Ads

  • Seamless access to membership information during call booking

  • Adjustable capacity planning to optimize schedules for max profitability

  • Real-time technician tracking

  • Greater customization and drill-down capabilities for reports

• Commercial service businesses

  • Ability to create customer-specific pricing

  • Built-in customer portal with base subscription

  • A suite of project management and project tracking tools for longer-term projects

  • Dynamic form capabilities that ensure staff follow best practices and improve data quality

  • Native equipment tracking and inventory management

For more details on these differences, check out our complete comparison article: FieldEdge vs. ServiceTitan.