For home service businesses
The best CRM for a small home service business holds the whole job, not just the contact
A CRM is meant to be one place that holds your customers and their work. Most of them hold the customer and lose the work. If you clean, garden, groom, fit, fix or visit people at home, that gap is where your money leaks out.
What a home service business actually needs to remember
A name and a mobile number is the easy part. The hard part is everything hanging off it. What you quoted. Whether they said yes. Which Tuesday you said you would come. The gate code. That the dog is friendly but the cat is not. What you charged last time, so this time matches.
None of that fits in a phone contact. So it ends up in a notebook, a text thread, a photo roll and your head. Then one of those four is unavailable at the moment you need it.
The test to put any CRM through
Pick a customer you worked for three months ago. Can you see, in under ten seconds and on your phone, what you quoted, what you did, what you charged and whether they paid?
If the answer is no, the tool is a contact list with a nicer badge on it. That question is worth more than any feature comparison.
One trail, from the first call to the review
- The customer. One record, with every job they have ever had underneath it. Repeat work is where a home service business makes its living, so the history is the valuable bit.
- The quote. Built from your own price list and sent as a link they can tap. Say yes on the link and it becomes the job by itself.
- The job. The notes, the photos, the hours and the days it is booked for, written on site and not from memory that evening.
- The diary. Booked days on a week view, so you can see where you are before you promise anybody anything.
- The invoice. Drafted from the job when the working day ends, waiting for you to read it and tap send.
- The money. One list of who has not paid, oldest first.
- The review. Asked for at the right moment, which is the day after a happy customer, never a fortnight later.
That whole trail is free to start, and it takes one customer to see it.
Start freeWhy five apps is worse than it sounds
Separate tools do not just cost five subscriptions. They cost you the joins. A quoting app that cannot start a job means typing the job. A diary that cannot see the job means typing the address. An invoice tool that knows nothing about the work means typing all of it, at the end of a long day, which is the moment it stops happening.
Every join you have to type by hand is a join that eventually gets skipped. That is how a business stops knowing what it is owed.
Built for one van, not for a call centre
DRSaaS is the everything app for trades and home businesses. Plumbers, cleaners, gardeners, mobile hairdressers, nail technicians and every other trade that turns up at somebody's door. It assumes you are on a phone, standing up, with one hand free, and that nobody is going to train you on it.
For a one person round there is more on the app for a self employed handyman page. The paperwork end is covered on the invoice app for tradesmen page.
What it costs
No card. No trial clock. Free for every business until 500 are active on it. After that it is £49 a month for one person, and no account pays anything without 90 days written notice first. Your first 12 months are free whatever happens.
Start free