Software vendors in this market use the same words to mean different things. One product's "estimate" is a fixed price a customer can accept with a signature; another's is a number in a PDF. One "offline mode" keeps working in a basement; another shows a spinner and loses the entry. That inconsistency is where buying mistakes come from, so this page defines each term as precisely as we can and, where it matters, tells you what to check before you believe a feature list.
Every definition links back to the guides where the term does real work. If something here is wrong, unclear, or missing, send it to[email protected].
Pricing and cost
The words vendors use on a pricing page, and what each one actually costs you over a season.
- Per-seat pricing
- A monthly fee charged for each person who can log in. It is the most common model in field service software and the one that punishes growth hardest: adding a third crew lead can raise your bill by 50% while your revenue rises by rather less. Read the fine print on who counts as a seat, because vendors differ on whether an office admin, a read-only bookkeeper, or a seasonal hire needs a paid one.
- Seat minimum
- The smallest number of users a plan will sell you, regardless of how many you need. A plan advertised at $49 per user with a five-seat minimum is a $245 plan for a two-person operation. This is the single most common reason a quoted price and an actual invoice do not match for owner-operators.
- Total cost of ownership
- The full annual cost of running a tool, not the sticker price: subscription, seat minimums, onboarding or implementation fees, payment processing spread, paid integrations, SMS and phone credits, extra storage, and the hours someone spends on data entry the software did not eliminate. Comparing TCO instead of monthly list price frequently reverses which of two products is cheaper.
- Onboarding fee
- A one-time charge for setup, data migration, and training, quoted separately from the subscription and often not shown on the public pricing page at all. It ranges from nothing to several thousand dollars. It is also the most negotiable line in a field service software contract, particularly if you are signing in the off-season when the vendor's quarter looks thin.
- Payment processing rate
- What you pay to take a card or ACH payment through the software, usually quoted as a percentage plus a fixed amount per transaction. On real volume this dwarfs the subscription: at 2.9% plus 30 cents, a company invoicing $40,000 a month through the platform pays roughly $1,200 a month in processing against maybe $200 in software. Always compare the rate, whether ACH is cheaper, and whether the vendor lets you use your own processor.
- Job costing
- Assigning actual labour hours, materials, equipment, and subcontractor costs to a specific job so you can see what it earned rather than what it invoiced. Software that does this well is what turns a hunch that hedge work is unprofitable into a number. Software that only tracks invoices cannot do it, no matter how good the reporting screen looks.
- Change order
- A documented addition to work already agreed, with its own price and the customer's approval attached. Handling change orders inside the software rather than by text message is the difference between billing for the extra load of mulch and eating it. Ask whether a change order can be approved from a phone in the field, since that is where the conversation actually happens.
Sales and customers
How work gets from an inbound call to a signed job, and the numbers that describe whether it is going well.
- CRM
- Customer relationship management: the system of record for who your customers are, what you have quoted them, what you have done for them, and what was said. In a landscaping context the useful test is not whether a product is called a CRM but whether property history, recurring service, and past estimates all live on one customer record. Plenty of tools labelled CRM do contacts and deals well and know nothing about a property.
- Speed to lead
- How long it takes you to respond to a new enquiry. It is the highest-leverage number in small field service sales, because homeowners requesting quotes typically contact several companies and often hire whoever answers first rather than whoever is cheapest. Measured in minutes, not days. Most software that claims to improve close rates is really just improving this.
- Estimate, quote, and proposal
- Vendors use these interchangeably; they are not the same commitment. An estimate is a considered approximation that may move. A quote is a fixed price you are offering to honour. A proposal is a quote plus the persuasion — scope, options, terms, photos. When comparing products, check which one the software actually produces and whether it can be accepted with a signature, because 'sends estimates' and 'closes deals' are different features.
- Good-better-best estimating
- Presenting three priced options rather than one number. It reliably raises average job value, because it moves the customer's question from whether to buy to which to buy. Worth checking explicitly when comparing estimating tools: many can only send a single-price document, which quietly rules the technique out.
- Win rate
- The share of estimates sent that turn into work. Tracking it by job type is where it earns its keep, since a healthy overall rate often hides one service line you keep bidding and never winning. Software that does not record why a lost estimate was lost can give you the number but not the reason.
- Customer lifetime value
- Total gross profit a customer produces before they leave. It matters disproportionately in recurring maintenance work, where a mowing client at modest monthly margin can be worth several thousand dollars over five years. It is also the number that justifies spending real money to acquire a client, and the reason churn on recurring routes deserves more attention than it usually gets.
- Recurring revenue
- Contracted work that repeats without being re-sold: weekly mowing, monthly maintenance, seasonal programs. It smooths the cash-flow trough that project-only landscaping companies hit every winter, and it is what makes a company saleable. Software matters here mainly in whether it can bill a recurring schedule automatically without someone re-keying it every month.
Scheduling and field operations
The half of the software that has to work on a phone, in a truck, with one bar of signal.
- Route optimisation
- Ordering a day's stops to reduce driving. The savings are real but smaller than the marketing implies unless your jobs are already geographically clustered — optimisation reorders the stops you have, it does not move them closer together. Check whether it accounts for time windows, crew skills, and job duration, or only for distance, since a mathematically shortest route that ignores a customer's access window is not usable.
- Route density
- How tightly your jobs cluster geographically. It is the most underrated profitability lever in recurring maintenance: a crew doing eight properties within two miles earns far more per day than one doing six spread across a county, at identical prices. This is why disciplined companies sometimes decline profitable-looking work outside their footprint, and why sales territory decisions outrank software decisions here.
- Dispatch
- Assigning jobs to crews and getting the change onto their phones. The feature to interrogate is what happens when the day breaks — rain, a no-show, a truck down. Software that makes reassigning an afternoon fast is worth more than software with a prettier calendar, because the second scenario is the one you live in.
- Recurring visit scheduling
- Generating a repeating series of jobs from one agreement — every Tuesday, every other week April through October — rather than booking each visit by hand. Any tool aimed at maintenance work should do this. Where they differ is in editing: skipping one visit for weather, or shifting a whole route forward a day, without detaching the series or re-creating the schedule.
- Geofencing
- Using a virtual boundary around a job site to trigger something automatically, usually clocking a crew in and out on arrival and departure. It removes the arguments that come with manual timesheets and produces trustworthy labour data for job costing. It also collects location data about employees, which has legal and cultural implications worth settling with your crews before you switch it on rather than after.
- Offline-first
- An app designed to work with no connection and reconcile when signal returns, as opposed to one that merely does not crash. The distinction is not marketing: an offline-first app lets a crew complete a job, capture photos, and collect a signature in a basement or a rural property, then syncs. A merely tolerant app shows a spinner and loses the entry. Test this on purpose, in airplane mode, before you commit.
- Wheels-down time
- Time crews spend actually working on properties, as distinct from driving, loading, fuelling, and waiting. It is the number that scheduling software genuinely moves, and the one to measure before and after a switch. Judging a routing tool by whether it feels faster produces no evidence; judging it by wheels-down hours per crew per week produces some.
Data and integrations
How your information moves between tools, and how hard it will be to leave.
- API
- An interface that lets other software read and write your data programmatically. For a small business the practical question is not whether an API exists but whether it is on your plan: vendors routinely restrict API access to higher tiers, which turns a documented integration into an upgrade you had not budgeted for.
- Webhook
- A message the software sends to another system the moment something happens, such as an estimate being accepted. Webhooks are what make automations feel instant rather than running on a fifteen-minute poll. If you plan to connect tools with Zapier, Make, or your own scripts, webhook support is worth more than a long integration directory.
- Two-way sync
- Changes flow in both directions between two systems and stay consistent. Most advertised accounting integrations are one-way pushes, which is fine until someone edits an invoice in the accounting package and the two records disagree permanently. Ask specifically which records sync, in which direction, and what happens on a conflict.
- Vendor lock-in
- The cost of leaving, which is what a vendor is really selling when migration is difficult. Photos attached to job history, signed estimates, and multi-year job costing data are the parts that usually cannot come with you. The defence is boring and effective: before you sign, find out exactly what a full export contains, and export once early so you know rather than assume.
- Data portability
- Your ability to get your own data out in a usable format, on your own initiative, without paying for it. A product that exports customers and invoices to CSV but not job photos, notes, or attachments is offering partial portability. Test the export during a trial, not during a dispute.
- Single source of truth
- One system that holds the authoritative version of a given record, with everything else referring to it. It is the actual goal behind most software consolidation, and the thing a spreadsheet kept alongside the software quietly destroys. Where two systems both claim to own the customer record, someone ends up reconciling them by hand every week.
Contracts and trust
Terms from the parts of a software agreement people skip, several of which cost money.
- SaaS
- Software as a service: you subscribe to software the vendor hosts and updates rather than buying and installing a version. It removes servers and upgrade projects, and it means your access ends when you stop paying, that features can change without your consent, and that the price is theirs to raise. Effectively every tool in this market is now SaaS.
- Annual commitment
- Paying for twelve months in exchange for a discount, typically 15–25% against monthly billing. Reasonable once you are certain of a product, expensive when you are not — a seasonal business that signs annually in March and abandons the software in July has usually paid for the whole year. Take the discount on the second contract, not the first.
- Auto-renewal and the notice window
- The clause that renews your contract automatically unless you cancel within a stated period before the renewal date, often 30 days. It catches people who decided to leave in month eleven and mentioned it in month twelve. When you sign anything annual, put the notice deadline in the calendar the same day, not the renewal date.
- SLA
- A service level agreement: a contractual uptime commitment with a remedy, usually a service credit, if it is missed. Most small-business plans do not include one, and a published status page is not the same thing. It matters most if your crews cannot dispatch when the product is down, which is worth pricing honestly against the cost of the plan that includes it.
- SOC 2
- An independent audit report on how a vendor handles security, availability, and confidentiality. You are unlikely to need it for residential work, but commercial and municipal clients increasingly ask their contractors what systems hold their site data and whether those vendors are audited. Worth knowing which of your tools can produce a report if a procurement questionnaire ever lands.
Where to go next
The terms above turn up throughout the research library. If you are shopping now, thecost calculatorputs real numbers behind total cost of ownership, theCRM comparisoncovers the customer-record questions, and thestack audit templateis the one to work through before you sign anything. Or start at thefull research library.