Smart Service

Being able to use iPads or tablets in the field. By being able to use tablets we take away the technicians penmanship errors and can have the customer sign work orders so there is no confusion of who said what later.

Not being able to track individual extinguishers by date and have them update to when service is needed.

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The program as a whole is outdated and clunky, built around Microsoft Access, limiting its modern application.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.

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.

It is fairly user friendly. I do like the posting and dispatch screens. Easy to read, easy to post. The ease of changing information is good and bad. From an accounting perspective, it is a bit soft on that aspect.

It took me longer to get the hang of this software than most softwares I have used. The reporting is not the best. Reporting is difficult to get what we want. It either has too much information or too little. I would like to see the ease of changing accouting information alot harder. It is too easy for the field techs to change.