HVACBossPro Blog — HVAC Software

Setting Up HVAC Software in Your First Week: A Day-by-Day Plan

New software either gets used in the first week or it gets put off until next season. For a small HVAC company, the difference is usually a plan. Here is one that fits around a normal working week, with an hour or two each day, so that by Friday your vans are running real calls from the tech app.

Before Day One

If you are coming from another system, the export and cutover steps are in Switching HVAC Software Without Losing Customers or Tune-Up Dates. If you are coming from paper, gather your customer spreadsheet, your current prices and a list of your maintenance customers. That is all you need to start.

Day 1: Company and Service List

Start with the things every estimate and invoice depends on:

• Company details: name, logo, contact information and sales tax.
• Your service list with your real prices. For most HVAC shops that means a diagnostic, cooling and heating tune-ups, your maintenance plan, and the parts and repairs you do most: capacitor, contactor, drain line, refrigerant per pound, blower motor, thermostat, coil cleaning.

Do not try to list everything you have ever charged for. Start with what covers most of your invoices, and add lines as they come up.

Day 2: Customers In

Clean up your spreadsheet (one column per part of the address, duplicates removed, dead customers dropped) and bring it in with a CSV import. Addresses are placed on the map automatically.

Then check the map for any pins in the wrong place and fix those addresses. Group property managers and businesses with several addresses under one client. Tag your maintenance customers Maintenance Plan and commercial accounts Commercial.

Day 3: Maintenance Agreements and Equipment

This is the day that pays off all year:

• Set each plan customer's interval: 180 days for spring and fall, 365 for yearly, or whatever you sell.
• Check the Waiting List. You should see plan customers coming due on the map, colored not due yet, due now or overdue.
• Enter the equipment you already know. If you have system types, models or filter sizes on old tickets for your best customers, add them now. Everything else fills in as techs visit.

Equipment fields are covered in Equipment Records on Every Job: System, Brand, Model, Serial, Tonnage and Filter Size.

Day 4: Techs, Vans and a Practice Day

Set up each tech as an employee with a personal PIN and assign them to a van. Add office users with the right roles.

Then build tomorrow on the dispatch board. Put a few due tune-ups from the Waiting List on one van and auto-route them from the shop. Add the service calls you already have booked.

At the end of the day, sit down with each tech for fifteen minutes. Have them open the tech app in their phone's browser, install it to the home screen and log in with the company login and their PIN. Walk through one card: the equipment line, the access notes, navigation, Start, Skip and Complete.

Day 5: First Live Day

Run the day from the software. The office watches the dispatch board; techs work from the tech app. Customers get on-the-way and arrived texts automatically.

Expect small bumps: a tech forgets to tap Complete, an address needs fixing, an access note is missing. Fix each one as it comes up. By the afternoon, the rhythm usually settles.

At the end of the day, look at what happened: jobs completed with photos and notes, invoices created, cards charged. That is the moment most owners decide the switch was worth it.

Days 6 and 7: Loose Ends

• Add your website forms, so service requests and plan sign-ups land in Form Responses.
• Set up monthly billing for property managers and commercial accounts who want one statement.
• Ask for cards on file at every visit next week, and point customers to the customer app.
• Retire the whiteboard. Next week's schedule lives on the dispatch board only.

If the Week Gets Away From You

Weeks in HVAC rarely go to plan. If a heat wave or a cold snap eats your setup time, do not abandon the plan; shrink it. The minimum that makes the software useful is your service list, your maintenance customers with their intervals, and one tech on the tech app. Everything else can wait a week. The worst outcome is putting it off until the season ends, because then the season's tune-ups are still in a spreadsheet.

Week Two and Beyond

After the first week, setup turns into habits: equipment filled in on every first visit, the Waiting List checked every morning, estimates sent from the job, invoices created at completion. Within a season, the records are complete for the customers you see most. To see everything that comes after setup, visit the HVAC software page.