Smart Service

That it integrates with quick books; is a good reoccurring database of our client with reoccurring work on semi and annual basis. no need for a separate data base anymore. When use with iFleet all work orders come back to the office electronically along with any photos taken, and can be processed immediately if desired; although some customers complained the guy was still in the parking lot when they got the invoice; LOL
the tech also has the ability to make estimates and email to the client right on the spot with our custom made form.
Has reduced our paper consumption by 80% in the first year.

Sometimes there is a long lapse between windows; generally it is several seconds but at time it can be 15 to 20 seconds.
Having to update the customer list almost everyday; it tedious and with over 10K clients can take a long time.

For the regular dispatching features, I was able to learn completely on my own with no instruction, becoming our in-house "expert." It is intuitive enough that I found solutions for problems that tech support thought had no work-around.

The program as a whole is outdated and clunky, built around Microsoft Access, limiting its modern application. For example, if you have a customer with 10 locations and 15 total jobs, and they change their billing address, you have to manually go change it 26 times, in a clunky system that is not fast at all.

Adding a new customer takes forever, especially if you have a location and job to enter as well. There is also no feature to have an AP email for their default QuickBooks email, while still have primary contact's email prevalent.

Scheduling is nice that a job can recur indefinitely, but if a job cancels, you have to change its recurrence pattern PRIOR to inactivating the job, or it still comes up on the schedule. It also has no features for a job to occur for a certain period of time, or to recur on a seasonal basis.

If your customers have multiple services per invoice, it is a huge pain. The "Batch invoices to Quickbooks" feature requires the user to post each individual batch one. at. a. time. Again, on a slow, clunky system.

Many of the advanced features have not worked for us at all, or were not as advertised in the demo. Granted, the most annoying part (the scheduler does not work for us) is largely due to our painfully slow cloud system, making it inoperable.

If you want to print a schedule for each employee, be prepared to pay for an upgrade (ours was $600) so they can program a custom report for you, that is iffy on how often it works on the first attempt. (Ours works on the second attempt every time.)

The "Prospect" feature is useless... it doesn't transition over to "Customer" well at all.

It is also impractical to use many features integrated with Quickbooks-- it requires syncing for anything useful, and with a large customer database, that is completely impractical for the frequency required.

Bill your customer a flat rate each month? Forget about it, unless you cheat the system and create two jobs-- one that is the real job for your employee and charges nothing, and one that only your accountant uses.

Bottom line: It's intuitive to figure out basic functions, but there is SO much room for error, and something simple like an updated address once took me 2 hours to complete for our largest customer. They need to do a complete overhaul of their programming and add some basic features before I could recommend Smart Service to anyone. We've found that to make it work, it requires constant ingenuity to come up with a work-around for design flaws.

Basic scheduling is very easy to learn, it only took me a couple of days to start scheduling basic calls. The rest involved mainly learning the service business that I work for in order to discover other needs within Smart Service. There is additional support via Smart Service's monthly webinars on various topics to assist with learning. I've attended 'Service Agreements' which I didn't know was possible until the webinar. I really like the reporting feature, it can generate useful data by request. For instance, pulling reports by customer location; if I want to view which customers live in South San Francisco I can easily create filters to do so. You really don't know how valuable a program is until your without it. We experienced our internet being down for half a day and had to go back to paper scheduling; that made us all realize how important Smart Service is to our business for sure!

If you misspell a customer name after selecting 'new customer/prospect' and make it to the main customer screen, you have to go into QuickBooks to make the corrections although it is a new customer. It would be better for new customers only to keep it unlocked until save is selected. That would save some time; I don't make constant errors but it happens occasionally. Also, tracking technicians does not seem to work 100%. I've made sure that their tablets are syncing but only have three technicians showing up on the map. Sometimes it can take a long time to load a customer and that delays a call and time. Other than those three minor problems, I can't really think of anything else.