ONDE work

HVAC contractors

An HVAC callback costs you the truck roll, the hours, and the job you did not take.

An HVAC contractor doing about $10M a year usually cannot separate the work that earns from the work that merely stays busy. Service agreements, one-off calls, and install work all land in the same revenue line, and the cost of going back out on a callback is absorbed into overhead where nobody sees it.

A callback that burns two technician hours and a truck roll is roughly $250 before you count the job that technician did not get to. Twenty a month is about $60,000 a year, and it is recorded nowhere as a cost.

Helps answer: How do we make money?

The questions an HVAC contractor cannot answer today

Can’t tell which one is yours? You are not supposed to be able to. That is the point.

What we connect

These are the systems a business like yours already runs on. Nothing here gets replaced. The work is joining what each one knows into one connected picture of how your business works.

  • Your field service platform
  • Dispatch and scheduling
  • Technician hours and truck stock
  • QuickBooks
  • Supplier invoices
  • Warranty and callback records

Named by what they do rather than by brand, because the brand matters less than whether the thing is connected to anything else.

What an HVAC contractor asks before they start

We already run a field service platform. What is left to connect?

A field service platform holds the job. It does not usually hold your true labour burden, your supplier invoices, or your accounting detail, so profitability still gets assembled by hand. The work is joining what the platform knows to what the books know.

Would we have to change how the techs work?

That is the wrong place to start. The first pass takes information that already exists and stops it being re-keyed. Asking technicians to do more admin to get better reporting defeats the purpose.

Can QuickBooks tell us which HVAC work is profitable?

Only at the level someone codes it. It will show revenue and cost by whatever categories are set up, but it does not know the callback, the drive time, or which agreement the visit belonged to unless something tells it.

We are seasonal. Does that change anything?

It raises the stakes on the invest question. A seasonal business makes its hiring and equipment decisions on a narrow window of evidence, so being wrong is more expensive.

Who owns what gets built?

You do, and the data with it. No licence to buy and no long contract.

Everything we have written for hvac contractors

5 articles, newest first.

The same problem in other trades

The systems change. The gap between what the field knows and what the books know does not.

Pick the three leaks you recognize. We’ll tell you what they typically cost a business your size, in dollars.

Pick the three you recognize. We’ll come back with what they cost, in dollars. No sales call, no sequence.

Would rather just talk? Text us, hello@ondework.com, or the contact form.