Key Difference #1: Fieldpoint Is Focused Primarily on Construction and Commercial Service, While ServiceTitan Has Robust Solutions For Hybrid Shops 

It’s enough to glance at Fieldpoint's website to learn that their primary focus is on commercial service industries: industrial equipment, facilities management, the medical industry, oil and gas.

If your business happens to offer one of those service lines, Fieldpoint may provide you with some helpful features. But when a service software straddles industries as wide ranging as medicine and security systems (another Fieldpoint offering), chances are that it’s going to lack some of the customization options that a more specialized, targeted product can offer.

ServiceTitan, on the other hand, has been designed specifically for contractors in HVAC, electrical, plumbing, pest control, landscaping, and select others.

We’ve purpose-built our product for these industries, so if your company has service lines that include one or more of them, the features and workflows that come standard with a ServiceTitan subscription are probably going to work better for you than Fieldpoint. 

By the same token, while Fieldpoint's commercial focus might suit commercial-only shops, their software likely won't be equipped as well for servicing residential customers. 

In other words: If you have a business that’s exclusively focused on residential homeowners, or if you rely on both commercial and residential customers for your revenue stream, ServiceTitan is almost certainly a better fit for your business.  

Below, we’ll look at three key features where these conceptual differences translate into real, on-the-ground business differences. Specifically:

• Pricebook functionality

• Project management software features

• Marketing features

Comparison of Pricebook Functionality

Pricebooks are the backbone of service companies. They’re key to maintaining profitability, and if they’re not kept properly updated, services and costs are likely to be mispriced and miscalculated, causing business owners to lose money. 

To maintain operational efficiency, businesses need to make sure their pricebooks are fully integrated to work seamlessly within their overall workflow. Estimates, work orders, and invoices should all be informed and populated by the most up-to-date pricebook items, services, and prices.

With ServiceTitan, contractors can approach the creation and management of pricebooks in three ways:

• Upload a pricebook that already works for them and manage it from within our platform. 

• Use ServiceTitan to build a new pricebook from the ground up.

• Opt for our Pricebook Pro upgrade, which features a diverse menu of flat-rate services and pricing—a great way to save time and get a big leg up on building out a complete pricebook.

ServiceTitan pricebooks can save contractors and their employees from having to sift through jumbled lists of products and materials by organizing items according to categories or business units. Hybrid shops, for example, can divide their pricebooks into residential and commercial categories, and those with multiple business units—HVAC, plumbing, and/or electrical, say—can similarly split up their listings to make things easy to find.    

Rather than require our users to export, import, and manually update spreadsheets to keep their pricebooks up to date—as is the case with most FSM software—ServiceTitan provides a suite of bulk editing tools, allowing contractors to update multiple items and services simultaneously. 

Our Dynamic Pricing feature makes pricebook management more efficient still, allowing users to customize automated updates to both pricing and overhead, like material costs, labor rates, and more. It also helps service providers stay profitable by ensuring that estimates and invoices reflect the most up-to-date pricing.   

If you’re like many of the contractors that we work with, you’re likely already using one or more of a handful of the service industry’s most popular suppliers—companies like Bosch, Daikin, Lennox, Goodman, Carrier, and Bryant. If so—or if you make a switch to these or numerous other suppliers with whom we have a relationship—you’ll find that, by switching on our Pricebook Connect feature, you can link your pricebook(s) directly to the materials catalogs from your preferred suppliers.

Pricebook Connect allows contractors to receive automated notifications of pricing changes, or have those changes reflected in their pricebook automatically. It also provides notifications about potential upgrades and alternatives tailored to the services you offer.  

Yet even with all of these advantages, managing a pricebook for optimal efficiency and profitability still presents challenges. 

Contractors—or, more likely, their employees—must keep track of pricing updates and ensure that they are mirrored (or at least taken into account) in all relevant services and packages to keep estimates accurate and margins in line with company goals.

With our Pricebook Pro add-on, ServiceTitan eliminates this time-consuming and potentially costly process. It accomplishes this in two key ways:

1. Pricebook Pro comes with expertly designed, flat-rate pricebook templates, allowing subscribers to draw on our detailed analysis of service industry average prices and best practices. This saves countless hours in setup time, and because our pricebooks are fully customizable, contractors can always add items and make surgical edits according to their needs and preferences. 

2. The ServiceTitan team is constantly monitoring fluctuations in the prices of the service industry’s most widely used suppliers. That way, our users don’t have to. 

ServiceTitan users who’ve opted for Pricebook Pro have reported average year over year revenue growth of 13%—the result of accurate, profit-focused pricing; increased close rates and higher average ticket prices. And as shown above, Pricebook Pro features product images, while also providing users with equipment links and service-related PDF documents. 

Along with virtually all ServiceTitan functionality, these features are available to contractors and office staff via desktop, as well as to field technicians on site, via mobile app with mobile devices including iPhone, Android, iPad, and other iOS technology. 

Fieldpoint—which, again, has a strong focus on commercial businesses and construction—does not appear to offer any platform-native pricebook functionality. Particularly for contractors specializing in residential service and those running hybrid shops, with both residential and commercial business units, this would be a huge disadvantage.  

Comparison of Project Management Features

To better support subcontractors that do construction work, ServiceTitan has an expanding suite of features of executing long term job management.

In this section, we’ll look at a few core features in our project management workflow:

• Creating estimates

• Job costing and project tracking

• Applications for payment

• Invoicing

Creating Estimates

Our project management workflow descends logically from the point of job initiation: the estimate. On an Estimate page, like the one shown above, contractors add tasks, equipment, materials, and payment specifications. When they’re done, they can print or email the quote to their customer. 

To further put the wheels in motion, they can also use this page to begin requisitioning equipment and materials:

Once line items have been selected for requisition, ServiceTitan guides users seamlessly to a purchase order interface designed for maximum ease of use:

Purchase orders can be addressed and delivered to the relevant procurement sources and suppliers, with directions for shipping to the job site, warehouse, or office. 

Automation ensures that, without any additional input, as expenses accrue, they get reflected in the Project Overview homepage. Documents generated later—applications for payment, invoices, continuation sheets, etc.—draw on the data memorialized in the initial estimate.   

Job Costing and Progress Tracking

As the name implies, the Project Overview page is also where all of a given project’s vital info is stored: project name, location, number, customer contact info, and more. Crucially, it’s also where contractors can reference data tables to stay on top of project job costing.

For example, the Budget v.s. Actual table—found, again, on the Project Overview page, and pictured here—helps service company owners and project managers track cash flow in real time, providing a precise picture of billings and costs, in terms of both dollars and fraction of the total. 

Meanwhile, a Project Summary table shows total expenses, total retainage, total payments received and total earned, invoiced to date, and percentage of the total contract sum completed. As a project progresses, these figures update automatically. 

An Expense Details chart provides a fine-grained breakdown of expenses to date. Clicking any line item will yield greater detail still, allowing ServiceTitan users to drill down to see exactly what the sources of their expenses are—which purchase orders or service professionals they came from, for example.

Applications for Payment

The Project Overview page is also where contractors will navigate to generate applications for payment. Clicking the Add Application for Payment button automatically creates a continuation sheet—using, again, information collected in the initial estimate. Contractors can then produce an  AIA® style application for payment and download it as a PDF. 

Simply by eliminating the need to update these documents manually, our users routinely save many labor hours every month.

Invoicing 

After a client has signed an application for payment, it takes just moments to generate an invoice, which can also be downloaded as a PDF for delivery.

As we’ve noted, with ServiceTitan, every last scrap of information related to each and every job and client is stored and scrupulously organized on a single, centralized platform. When it comes time to defend applications for payment and/or defeat payment denials—as it inevitably does, at least occasionally—this vast archive of evidence makes doing so much easier.

In reviewing Fieldpoint’s website, they do not appear to offer any equivalent feature set to our project management workflow at this time.

Comparison of Marketing Features

ServiceTitan offers a variety of features and upgrades that help service businesses leverage marketing to grow their annual revenue. 

First, we have our Marketing Pro add-on, which helps to maintain a steady stream of revenue year-round by marketing through email and direct mail to existing customers, as well as doing reputation management. 

Our email and direct mail features offer easy ways to create targeted campaigns by zeroing in on one of a handful of common service industry opportunity categories: unsold estimates, expiring membership agreements, aging equipment, and idle accounts, for example.

By leveraging our professionally designed email and postcard templates, Marketing Pro users can grow revenue with their existing customer base with minimal effort.

In addition, we also offer robust marketing reporting features that allow businesses to track ROI at the campaign level. That way, they can see which of their marketing channels and campaigns are performing (and which aren’t), allowing them to make the most of their marketing investments.

And lastly, our Local Services Ads integration allows our users to offer a seamless booking process to prospects, right through Google search. This increases conversion rates, further helping to grow revenue with new customers. 

As with pricebook management and our project marketing workflow, Fieldpoint does not seem to offer any native marketing features—again, a tremendous drawback, particularly for small businesses that rely on residential customers and small  to mid-sized commercial clients for their livelihoods. 

Key Difference #2: Fieldpoint Relies On Many Third-Party Integrations, While ServiceTitan Is a True All-In-One Platform

As we’ve outlined above, despite what might appear to be surface similarities, ServiceTitan and Fieldpoint actually function quite differently. This is in large part because while ServiceTitan was founded, designed, and developed by trade industry experts in the residential and commercial service industries, Fieldpoint focuses intensely on the construction business and other, more industrial, service lines, like facilities management and oil & gas.

We’ve highlighted what this means in practical terms by walking through how ServiceTitan handles three major areas:

• Pricebook functionality

• Project management features

• Marketing features

But as we noted early in this post, another major difference between Fieldpoint and ServiceTitan is the extent to which Fieldpoint relies on third-party integrations.

To make Fieldpoint work for your business as a holistic FSM, you’ll need to integrate it with other tools. For example, they state on their Microsoft Business Central integration page that, “Fieldpoint's field service software needs customer information, vendors, resources, parts and inventory and product descriptions to run successfully.” 

In other words, to use Fieldpoint successfully, you need to integrate with multiple software as a service (SaaS) other products: CRMs like Salesforce, business management platforms like Microsoft Dynamics GP or Netsuite, payroll platforms, ERPs, and the list goes on. 

This approach has very significant practical implications. To operate Fieldpoint effectively, contractors and their employees may often need to run multiple programs—in multiple windows—simultaneously, potentially reducing efficiency and introducing opportunities for error and distraction. (This goes for everyone from senior managers to customer support staff on the helpdesk.) 

Each of these additional products comes with a separate subscription, a separate fee, and a learning curve—never mind that glitches and data loss that often accompany the integration of multiple complex platforms. And with data and processes spread across a web of disparate software products, tracking and auditing information throughout business operations can be challenging. The decentralized nature of this approach also means that viewing real-time reporting data and drilling down to determine the accuracy and sourcing for that data, is often very difficult.    

In contrast, while we do have select integrations such as integration with QuickBooks, ServiceTitan is a far more holistic solution: a one-stop-shop that helps contractors streamline their operations and grow revenue by seamlessly integrating all of their core business functions—from customer management to inventory management—on a single service application. If this model sounds right for your company (and especially if you have a home service business or hybrid shop) a comprehensive FSM s like ServiceTitan is probably the right bet.

Discover what ServiceTitan can do for your commercial or home service business. Schedule a call to get a personalized demo of our software today.