Most of the ServiceM8 accounts we see going wrong were not set up badly. They were set up without anyone deciding how the business actually works first. The software ends up describing a business nobody runs, so the staff quietly go back to the notebook and the WhatsApp group.
So before you touch a single setting, settle these.
How does a piece of work arrive, and what is it called?
Every trade business has more than one route in. A phone call. A message. An email from a letting agent. A repeat customer who just texts “same as last time”. A commercial contract with scheduled visits.
Write those routes down. For each one, decide what it becomes: a job straight away, or a quote first. That single decision drives most of the rest of the setup, and it is the one people skip.
What has to be captured on site, every time?
The point of doing this properly is that the information comes back with the engineer instead of living in their head until Thursday.
Be specific. Not “notes” — but which readings, which photos, which signature, which certificate. If your trade has paperwork that has to exist for compliance reasons, that is the first thing to build, because it is the one thing that cannot be chased later.
The test: could someone who was not on that job invoice it correctly from what came back? If not, you have not captured enough.
Who does what, and who is allowed to see it?
Sole traders can skip this. Everyone else cannot.
Decide who books work in, who prices it, who sends invoices, and who chases money. Then decide what each of those people needs to see. Getting this wrong in either direction causes problems: too tight and people cannot do their job, too loose and your staff can see your margins.
Where does the money end up?
Decide before you start whether ServiceM8 or your accounts package is the source of truth for a customer’s details, and which one raises the invoice. Not both.
If you have an accountant or a bookkeeper, this is a conversation to have with them before you migrate anything, not after. Reconciling two systems that disagree about a customer’s name and address is a genuinely miserable job, and it gets worse the longer it runs.
What are you bringing across, and what are you leaving behind?
There is always a temptation to migrate everything. Ten years of customers, every old quote, every job from the last system.
Resist it. A migration is a chance to leave the rubbish behind. Decide what you actually need: current customers, live jobs, outstanding money, and the asset or service history you are legally or practically obliged to keep. The dead records can stay in an export file somewhere safe.
What is the first thing your staff will do with it?
This is the one that decides whether the setup survives contact with reality.
Pick one thing — usually “get the job details on my phone and get the paperwork back off it” — and make that work perfectly before you build anything clever. If the first week is smooth, people will use the second week. If the first week is fiddly, they will find a way round it and you will never get them back.
The order we do it in
For what it is worth, this is the sequence we work through with a business:
- Map how work actually arrives and what it becomes.
- Build the on-site capture — the forms, photos and sign-off the job needs.
- Wire up the money side and agree the source of truth with the bookkeeper.
- Migrate the minimum viable data set.
- Train the people who touch it, in the order they touch it.
- Leave it a fortnight, then fix what real use exposed.
Step six is not optional. Every setup needs it, and it is the step that gets cut when someone is doing this alone at 9pm.
If you would rather not do it yourself
That is what our setup work is. We do it remotely, we do it for trade businesses, and we use ServiceM8 in our own plumbing and heating business every day — so the questions above are ones we have already had to answer for ourselves.
See what setup and support involves, or tell us about your business and we will tell you straight whether it is worth it.