Housecall Pro vs Skimmer: Which is a better fit?

Damien: Hi. I'm Damien. I'm an HVAC professional. I have my own company. And I give Housecall Pro a five out of five. I've used a couple other companies for the services of dispatching and things of that nature. The first would be SuccessWare, which was a company owned program, which was okay. It did the job. The other one was a pretty big company, ServiceTitan, which is a great program however, not really meant for someone with probably less than 50 trucks. It's quite an expensive process, an expensive program to use. I use Housecall Pro because it's cost-effective for me and any small business, really. It still gives you all of the benefits, or near about all the benefits that a ServiceTitan would and it's geared more for people like me. Yes, I chose Housecall Pro due to its price, especially for a small business like mine, the functionality, the benefits of it, and I can bring my wife in, who has never even done HVAC, and she's able to excel in there, and to send out postcards and notify customers and book appointments, with little to no training at all. It's a very, very good program designed for someone like myself. Integrating Housecall Pro was super easy for me. All I did was stay on the phone call with the guy for about 30 minutes, get all the information. And because I had done something similar to it in the past, it helped me out a little bit more. They have plenty of tutorials and standby assistance for anything that you may need. They have chat. It's super easy. Housecall Pro would definitely be a choice for anybody starting in the HVAC industry at least in my experience. I've worked with several other companies that provide somewhat similar things. I've been asked to try other programs, but Housecall Pro is where it's at. It's the best priced, best functionality, best benefits that I've ever seen.

Elizabeth: I'm Elizabeth. I am our office administrator. We have about 35 employees, and I would give Skimmer a four. So we just used to use Excel spreadsheets for all of our routes. So when we switched to Skimmer, that solved a world of trouble for us. We only use it for our weekly service routes right now, and we do about 570 pools a week. So having Skimmer has very much so cleared up all of the Excel spreadsheets, has been a huge help for us. So we chose Skimmer because we definitely needed to be in the 21st century for our weekly service routes and just having so many pools that were in the backyards of, we needed to have record of their chemicals, what was done at every job, contact information, gate codes, all that good stuff in one quick snapshot for each customer. So Skimmer definitely allows all of that. You can have notes, their pricing structure, gate codes, dog names, multiple contacts for each person. So that was super, super helpful. Obviously, having the chemical records of every visit, everything that was added, and then the history to keep that on there. Checking off boxes for monthly back washes and skimming the pool, brushing the pool, vacuuming the pool. Those are all things that sometimes guys can forget how often they do it. So it reminds them, oh, it's been four weeks since this was done. So that is super helpful to have that reminder, so that I'm not having to call and be like, "Hey, it's been a month." So that's primarily what we use it for and really love it so far. The reminders for work orders, if guys need notes. Small appointments we do through Skimmer, but primarily just our weekly service and we really love it. So getting started with Skimmer was super easy. Really was just inputting all of our customer information. They made that really easy. I believe we had someone help us with that, just to make sure that all of our information went into the right fields within Skimmer's platform. And from there, it was pretty self-explanatory. They have a really great online resource of the help page and customer support is really awesome. They answered lots of my questions from the beginning, and were always so patient and kind about it, of course. So onboarding, super easy. Very user-friendly platform. Even building all of our routes. 570 is a lot, but they made that really, really user-friendly. So I would definitely recommend if you were looking into Skimmer to have a handful of people from different departments sit in on the demos with them and have them play around with the software. I think when we onboarded, we had a trial that we had for maybe a week, I could be wrong, but if they offer that, definitely do it. Have multiple people play around with it, test out things, just to make sure that it will be a good solution for multiple departments. Unfortunately, for us, we just needed a quick solution back when I implemented it. So we still do all of our scheduling for every other department on a different platform. So if you do need it for scheduling repair work or different types of appointments that don't reoccur every single week, I would say maybe they're not the best solution. That's the only reason I gave them one star off, because that would be really helpful to have a calendar that we could see for scheduling. That's the main reason we haven't switched over. So if you're looking for that portion of it, they're not quite there yet. They definitely are working towards having better integration with QuickBooks Online. Unfortunately, we're on desktop, so we cannot integrate that way. But for what we use it for, it's really awesome. But ask a lot of questions, get to know some of the staff with Skimmer so you have a good contact, and if you can do a trial, definitely do a trial.