Before You Build Custom Field Service Software, Ask This First

Your dispatchers are running a second system nobody designed. A whiteboard. A group text. A spreadsheet that got forwarded so many times nobody remembers who built the original formula. That's not a failure of discipline. It's what happens when the off-the-shelf platform assumed a workflow your company doesn't have.

The real trigger for going custom is cost, not a wish list of features. When the spreadsheet everyone secretly runs the business on takes longer to maintain than it would cost to replace it properly, that's the signal worth paying attention to. If your team spends real hours every week re-keying what the field already captured, reconciling what the off-the-shelf tool refuses to track, or building reports by hand because the platform's export doesn't match how your finance team works, that's the number to look at.

Sometimes you shouldn't build

We turn down projects a specialist would do better, or that an existing product already solves for a tenth of the price. You'll hear that in the first call, not the third. If your dispatch and quoting problems are the kind an off-the-shelf field service platform already handles well, we'll say so and point you there.

Discovery week exists partly to find this out before anyone commits real money. It's a flat $4,800 week that ends in a written scope, an architecture sketch and a fixed estimate, credited back in full if you continue. Sometimes it ends in "buy the thing that already exists." Better to learn that for a few thousand dollars than after a six-figure build.

Offline-first means the job finishes with no signal at all

A technician should be able to complete an entire job with no connection — photos, signature, barcode scan — and have the device reconcile that work properly once it comes back online. We build this on Swift, Kotlin and React Native, with offline-first data capture and conflict handling built into the job itself, not bolted on after. We handle App Store and Play submission as part of the engagement, so that's not sitting on someone's desk six weeks after the software is otherwise done. More detail is on our mobile apps page.

Device management for company-owned hardware runs alongside it. A crew phone that gets reassigned, lost or wiped shouldn't take your job data with it.

Getting dispatch, quoting, inventory and billing to stop lying to each other

A custom CRM means pipeline, quoting and job scheduling living in one place, connected to email, calendar and phone-system hooks, so a call that comes in doesn't need to be manually logged somewhere else. Invoicing flows into your accounting package instead of getting re-typed by someone in finance at month end. Moving off an existing CRM includes import from the prior system, so job history doesn't evaporate on cutover day.

It covers quoting, dispatch, inventory, billing, workflow, roles and reporting as one connected system, so the office isn't re-entering what the field crew already captured on-site. Every re-entry point is a place data gets wrong: a quantity mistyped, a note dropped, a signature that never makes it into the file finance needs for the invoice. More on how we scope this on the CRMs and internal tools page.

What this actually costs and how long it takes

Real numbers, not an order-of-magnitude guess. A CRM or internal tools build runs from $38k, typically 8 to 18 weeks. A mobile app for field crews runs from $60k, typically 12 to 22 weeks. Those are starting points. The real number comes out of discovery week. Billing runs Net 14, on milestones, so there's no ambiguity about when money moves.

You own it, and someone stays accountable

The code is yours from day one. Repos live in your organisation, not ours. Infrastructure runs in your own cloud account, not a shared environment we control. A named lead stays with the project from the scoping call through launch.

We build on React, Node and Postgres for CRMs and internal tools, and Swift, Kotlin and React Native for mobile. Boring technology, on purpose. Novelty is a cost paid every year after launch, by you, in developers who are harder to find and documentation that doesn't exist yet. Field crews don't need a system that's interesting. They need one that still works the same way in three years.

Start with one phase, not one bet

You don't have to commit to the whole system at once. A fixed-scope project starts from $28k per phase, billed on milestones, 30% at kickoff and the rest on phase acceptance, and includes 30 days of post-launch fixes. If the real trigger for you is a billing and reporting mess rather than a full field app, integrations and data work starts from $22k, typically 4 to 10 weeks, and can stand on its own as a first phase. Start small, see the phase accepted, then decide what comes next.