Stellar customer service has put your HVAC company on an upward trajectory, compelling you to hire more technicians. The service calls and requests are trickling in, and your customer support team is swiftly turning them into work orders.
But how do you keep up with the growing work demand and ensure technicians get the repairs, maintenance, and installation done according to customer satisfaction? Our answer is to utilize multifunctional HVAC GPS tracking software. HVAC apps enable you to schedule, dispatch, and track your techs as they complete work orders.
In this guide, we’ll reveal the top five apps for HVAC service. The apps differ in features, performance, and pricing and are geared towards businesses of different sizes. Read on to get a closer look at the fine details of each app to make an informed decision for your business needs
Are you looking for the best HVAC GPS tracking software for your company?
Learn how Timeero can help you track your crew’s time, locations, and mileage, and streamline your workflows.
Ideally, the best app for an HVAC business should include scheduling, dispatching, time tracking, technician location tracking, mileage tracking, billing, and invoicing features. The apps on our list come with the must-have tools. Read on to discover an HVAC app with the ideal features needed to optimize business operations and grow your bottom line.
Timeero – Best HVAC GPS Tracking Software
Timeero is, without a doubt, the best HVAC GPS tracking app by far. Firstly, the software enables you to schedule technicians, track time, log business miles, and monitor the movement of your field teams. Secondly, the web and mobile apps are easy for the back-end staff field technicians.
Let’s get into the details of Timeero’s key features:
Scheduling and Dispatching
Timeero allows you to create customizable job schedules.
Scheduling and dispatching are the linchpins of successful HVAC service. When service calls come in, you must swiftly respond and act upon them in the shortest time possible to mitigate HVAC downtime. Timeero allows you to create work orders (jobs and tasks) and quickly assign them to the most qualified technician.
Whether it’s preventative maintenance or emergency repair, you can quickly schedule and dispatch a technician immediately after the customer hangs up the call. Just click on a day of the week, add details about the customer issue, and assign it to a relevant technician.
You can assign a task or job to an individual or a team of techs. Each technician will get a notification with details about the task, such as customeraddress, description of the job, and date and time.
The technician can decline or accept the task based on availability.
Timeero is designed to prevent schedule conflict. Suppose you schedule an AC technician for an AC repair job between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm. Timeero’s app feature will lock the technician’s scheduled hours so no other task is assigned to the technician during that time slot.
This discourages job scheduling conflict, which, more often than not, leads to missed appointments and declining customer experience.
Shift Reminders
Setting up reminders helps minimize no-shows. With Timeero, the app can be configured to notify technicians 60 minutes before their next task, ensuring they stay ahead of schedule and are well-informed about their upcoming appointments.
This proactive approach not only keeps technicians on track but also enhances their knowledge of scheduled jobs, ultimately contributing to improved customer service rates.
Location Tracking
Besides technician tracking, Timeero is also apt for GPS fleet tracking.
A lot can happen when technicians are out in the field:Technicians might arrive late, take the wrong routes, or misuse company time. Timeero GPS location tracking lets you maintain a 360-degree view of field technicians to identify issues that might prevent them from fulfilling their tasks.
When you open the “Who’s working” tab, you can see the real-time location of each technician. Timeero monitors the location of each tech and updates the information within seconds.
GPS location tracking is a game-changer in the HVAC business industry. Location tracking allows you to see how far a technician is from the customer’s address and provide an accurate expected arrival time (ETA).
Let’s take a look at the following scenario to see why Timeero’s GPS location tracking is the best in the business. Suppose a customer calls with an emergency of leaking refrigerant, which is hazardous and requires immediate attention.
You need to send a technician out as soon as possible because the longer the leak persists, the more serious the problem becomes. With Timeero, all you need to do is open the map to pinpoint the tech’s location proximate to the address and request them to complete the work order, fixing the leak and preventing further damage to the customer’s equipment.
Timeero GPS location tracking is also helpful for vehicle tracking. For example, if you have a delivery van, you can track its real-time location via the driver’s smartphone to determine when the ventilation and air conditioning materials being delivered to a customer will reach their final destination.
Time Tracking
Timeero is the best time-tracking tool for your field service business.
Scheduling, dispatching, and location tracking features focus on making sure technicians attend the assigned jobs at the right time. Time tracking is another essential tool that most HVAC companies need to accurately compensate their workers. This is where the Timeero time tracker comes in handy.
Technicians select the assigned job before clocking in. The app tracks their time automatically and attributes the hours to the selected job. If technicians do multiple jobs with different rates, they can easily switch between tasks within a project. This solves the wage determination issues, enabling you to compensate them fairly.
Geofencing and Facial Recognition to Prevent Time Theft
Geofencing helps improve the accuracy of timesheets for back office staff or technicians working on new installations at a specific site. It prevents off-site punching, a timecard padding tactic that enables employees to claim compensation for hours they didn’t work.
In a situation where you have a team installing a new boiler or furnace at a factory, you can put a virtual boundary around the factory. Timeero’s virtual boundaries component allows technicians to clock in or out only if they are on-site or within the factory’s premises.
Facial recognition can also be used in the app to stop buddy punching. Timeero takes photos of technicians and back-end staff as they clock in and compares them to their profiles. If the photos result in a mismatch, it flags the time cards and notifies the managers or business owners are notified.
Segmented Tracking
Unlike other software options, Timeero allows you to track technicians’ trips by the stops they make.
Field service jobs require technicians to travel from one address to another. In a perfect world, Technicians should spend less time behind the wheel and more time solving customer issues.
While this isn’t achievable overnight, your workforce can improve gradually. To track worker progress, you must measure both metrics – time spent driving and time spent assisting customers.
Typically, you’d have to ask technicians to clock in and out at every customer's address. Relying on this manual method is more likely to result in errors since it depends on techs’ ability to remember to punch.
With this unique feature, technicians clock in once at the start of the day. Timeero tracks their movement during the workday and segments their trip based on their stops at customer addresses. It automatically calculates time spent at an assigned address and the distance between addresses. It also gives you other helpful details, such as:
Total time worked
Clock in and clock out location and time
Breaks
Another essential feature is suggested mileage, which recommends the shortest route to a customer’s address. This is a handy feature for businesses that want to lower fuel costs and tech’s windshield time.
Automate Payroll Calculations
Calculating employee remuneration manually can be a nightmare, especially for large HVAC contractors. Timeero saves you the hassle, allowing you to generate payroll reports with a few clicks of a button and send them to your finance department for immediate remuneration.
For example, it multiplies employee hours in a month with their predefined rates, taking into account overtime and double time, to compute their monthly earnings. Similarly, it calculates the mileage reimbursement using the predefined cost-per-mile rate for techs. It also supports QuickBooks integrations for expedient payment processing.
Timeero offers a 14-day free trial – No credit card is required. Start a free trial today to get a first-hand feel for Timeero’s capability for HVAC businesses. There’s no base price for the paid plans: the basic plan costs $4 per user per month.
ServiceTrade — HVAC App for Job Scheduling
ServiceTrade makes it easy for customer support and dispatching teams to assign jobs to qualified technicians.
ServiceTrade is another reliable GPS tracking app for HVAC, geared toward businesses that want to streamline scheduling and dispatching. It doesn’t support mileage tracking but is apt for technician location tracking, route optimization, and time tracking.
Regarding location tracking, the ServiceTrade dashboard provides the most recent map of the tech’s GPS location with status like en-route, arrived, planning, or departed. This is still helpful if you want to dispatch a technician for an urgent job nearby, but there’s a caveat.
ServiceTrade doesn’t provide the real-time location of technicians. Instead, the map displays the tech’s location during the most recent clock-in.
ServiceTrade requires technicians to select the assigned task to clock in. Clocking out is also easy but has an additional feature. If a technician has completed a job, they have to mark it complete before clocking out.
Effective Scheduling and Dispatching
ServiceTrade’s strength is scheduling and dispatching. This HVAC software solution offers two scheduling modes: dispatch board and map scheduler. The former offers a monthly calendar overview of technicians with their assigned jobs. You can use the drag-and-drop scheduler to assign jobs to different techs or change the appointment date.
The map scheduler combines a map and a weekly calendar view. You can filter jobs by status (assigned or unassigned) or categories like planned maintenance, preventative maintenance, replacement, service call, etc.
The app displays the jobs as pins on a map. You click on a pin to zoom in on task details such as address and due date and assign it to the available technician.
ServiceTrade pricing: ServiceTrade offers three pricing plans: Select, Premium, and Enterprise. Pricing details are available upon request.
FieldEdge — HVAC App for Skill-Based Dispatching
FieldEdge is one of the best HVAC software providers for skill and location-based dispatching.
Like ServiceTrade, FieldEdge excels at field technician dispatching but has a unique way of doing it to deliver high-quality service.
FieldEdge is not the most efficient time tracker, but it does the job. It automatically populates working, traveling, and idle time in the timesheets as techs change the status of the assigned work order. Technicians can enter time manually on a work order, but this isn’t recommended because it leaves room for intentional and accidental timesheet errors.
Skills and Location-Based Dispatching
FieldEdge ensures you’re not assigning jobs to technicians because they are available. Instead, it enables you to assign technicians jobs based on availability, location, and skills.
You’ll see the available technicians when you choose a “book for later” on the map under the dispatch board. The app shows a gray star next to the most qualified technicians, but that’s not all. In addition, it marks the most proximate tech with a gold star.
Assigning the job to technicians with a gold star ensures that they can jump to the task and get it done quickly. It saves and helps make the most of the technician’s day and expertise.
FieldEdge pricing: FieldEdge has a quote-based pricing model. Contact the vendor for in-depth pricing details.
Apploye – HVAC App for Location Tracking
Apploye helps ensure technicians arrive at designated addresses to minimize AC and ventilation equipment downtime.
Apploye is a field service management software suitable for small businesses. The time tracking feature is built into the app, but the location tracking is available through the Field
Service add-on (we’ll discuss that in a bit).
When it comes to scheduling and dispatching field technicians, Apploye is reliable. You can quickly create tasks and assign them to technicians. Tasks are displayed on the technicians’ mobile devices, so they are always informed of their next assignment. The user-friendly app also makes it easy for technicians to complete tasks in the field.
Live Location Tracking
Now, let’s discuss the Field Service add-on. One of the key features of this add-on is live location. This feature enables you to track the real-time location of your HVAC technicians. In addition, the add-on offers a Route Map functionality that helps you track the techs’ live location and route during their daily work.
The dark circle on the map shows the technician’s clock-in location, the red pins show the addresses visited,with the circle at the end of the trail representing their clock-out location.
The Job Sites tool enables you to create geofences around project sites. It prevents off-site punching, making it ideal when working on site-based projects, such as installing new boilers, furnaces, and ACs.
Other Key Features:
Time tracking
Project management and budgeting
Idling time tracking
RemoteTrack
Invoicing
Automatic payroll calculations
Apploye integrations: Asana, ClickUp, and Trello
Apploye offers two pricing plans: the Standard plan costs $2.50 per user per month (billed annually), whereas the Elite plan sets you back $3.50 per user per month (billed annually). Each plan comes with a 10-day free trial.
Lystloc – HVAC App for Geofenced Location Tracking
Lystloc makes it possible to create tasks and assign them to technicians.
Lastly, we have Lystloc, a field technician tracking software with its strongest point being tracking technicians’ GPS locations. But location tracking isn’t its only perk. As an HVAC app, Lystloc simplifies task and job management, time tracking, and mileage tracking.
The good thing about Lystloc dispatching is that it enables you to create tasks based on customer service calls or requests. Suppose a customer calls in with a request for AC and ventilation repair.
The app requires you first to create the customer and define their address. You can then convert both requests into individual tasks and attach them to the customer. This way, it’s easier to manage tasks by a customer while assigning them to the most qualified technician.
Geofenced Location Tracking
Lystloc enables you to create geofences around customer addresses. Unlike Timeero, the app doesn’t use geofences for time tracking but for monitoring technicians’ movement. It notifies you when a technician enters or leaves a geofenced address.
In addition, you can open the “tracking” tab to see clocked-in technicians and their live location. You can click on a technician to monitor their day-to-day activities. Lystloc shows a green “L” icon on the map representing the technician’s log-in locations.
The red “W” represents waiting time. This is when the technician wasn’t moving and might represent the time they were working on assigned jobs. Lastly, the red “L” pin on the map shows where the technician logged out.
The success of your HVAC business depends on how quickly and efficiently you resolve customer issues. This means that besides hiring the best technicians, you must build an efficient dispatching and tracking strategy. To actualize that plan, you’ll need the support of the best HVAC GPS tracking software like Timeero.
Timeero is the heartbeat of your company’s quality service. It automates critical back-office tasks while streamlining field workflows. It helps you schedule and dispatch technicians and monitor them every step of the way to ensure they show up at the customer’s address in time.
Start a 14-day free trial today to learn how Timeero has allowed some of your competitors to keep it all together to grow their profitability. No credit card is required — just create an account, and you’re good to go.
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Samson is a mathematician turned content marketer specializing in SaaS and Tech content. He focuses on the practical aspects of software systems while keeping abreast of the industry’s cutting-edge principles to create informative and engaging content. When he’s not writing, Samson spends time playing or watching soccer.
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