Over the past couple of months we’ve added, by request, Account Statements and Payment Receipts. Today we’re happy to announce that you can now e-mail Statements and Receipts to your customers right from Jobber, the same way you can with Invoices. This is something a lot of you have been asking for, and it’s sure to save some valuable time!

To e-mail a Statement or Payment Receipt, simply open any existing Payment or create a Statement from the Transactions pane on any Client in Jobber and you’ll be given the option to either download a printable PDF or e-mail directly to the Client.

More information about Payment Receipts and Statements can be found in the Payment Tracking section of the Billing & Invoicing Jobber Documentation.

We hope you find this new functionality useful — we look forward to bringing you even more time and money saving features in the near future, so stay tuned!

Sincerely,
The Jobber Team

Whether you’re doing it on pen-and-paper, with software, or using D12 dice, any approach is going to have challenges. Our job is to minimize them.

We’ve made a lot of progress with the Jobber Scheduling System over the past number of months, introducing new features, improving existing ones and enhancing performance along the way.

We’ve also received a lot of great feedback from our users, which has been essential in helping to make scheduling in Jobber better, and I’d like to thank everyone for their input.

We’re starting to move forward with a series of changes that will drastically improve scheduling in Jobber.

Read on to learn more about what’s changed, and what’s coming next.

We’ve Got Our Ear to the Ground

There are two common pieces of feedback we’ve been hearing, and this next batch of scheduling improvements will deal with them both.

1. It’s a lot of effort and/or too confusing to set up my recurring contract jobs for maintenance based work.
2. I have monthly contracts with my customers, but I need to bill them per visit, rather than at a fixed rate per month.

We’ve heard you loud and clear, and over the past month we’ve completely re-engineered the scheduling engine inside of Jobber in order to deal with these issues, as well as to better accommodate some awesome future functionality we’ve got on the drawing board.

Your Feedback = Improvements

Early this morning we deployed the first piece of our newly envisioned scheduling system. The new system fundamentally changes how scheduling data is dealt with internally, and improves stability, speed, and usability of the existing scheduling functionality. You won’t notice any significant changes to how scheduling works with this update, but there are a few important things to make note of:

1. Now you can specify Time and Crew information right when creating a new Job. This is true for One Off and Recurring Contract Jobs. If you specify Time and Crew information for a Contract Job it will apply to all Visits for the Job.
2. Now you can easily move and even delete Visits without worrying about any unexpected behaviour. It’s important to note that moving a single Visit has no effect on future Visits. If you would like to reschedule a Job so that it occurs every Wednesday instead of every Monday for instance, you can do so by editing the Job itself.
3. A new tickbox has been added when editing a Visit that is labelled “Update all future Visits with this scheduling and crew information?” When this is ticked, any change to Time and Crew information on the Visit will apply to all future visits as well. There has also been a button added when viewing any Visit that performs this same action.
4. We’ve made a nice little change to the crew selectors throughout Jobber. You’ll notice that it’s now a link that you click which lets you select or un-select multiple employees at once. Much quicker, and much nicer to use.

What’s Next

The next step in this series of improvements, now that we have a more solid foundation, is to build out Per-Visit Billing functionality. We know this is something that a lot of you in maintenance based landscaping have been asking for — we’re already hard at work on it, and we’ll have this exciting new functionality ready for you very soon.

Per-Visit Billing is exciting for a bunch of other reasons too. We’ll get into more detail in a future Jobber Blog post, but this new functionality will allow us to introduce Visit specific services for contracts, service templating, and other cool features to make managing your field service business even easier.

You can check out the updated Scheduling Documentation for more information about how scheduling works in Jobber. We also encourage you to watch the 20 minute Quick Start Tutorial Video if you haven’t already — it’s a great way to quickly get familiar with some of what Jobber can do.

We hope these changes are already helping you manage your business better, and we look forward to introducing the rest of our overhauled scheduling system! Stay tuned!

Sincerely,
The Jobber Team

It’s been a few weeks since our last post, and we’ve been hard at work on a number of improvements and additions to the software, both big and small, from Invoice number searching to scheduling improvements that we’re really excited to announce.

Read on for all the latest, as well as a peek at what’s coming!

Easier Business Management with These Improvements

At any given point in time we’re always working on something big here at Jobber — a brand new feature, a re-working of an existing feature for better performance, improved interfaces or a cool integration. But we always have a list of smaller things we want to work on too. Often times these are improvements suggested by our customers (thanks customers!), or just items that we’ve made note of while working on the bigger stuff.

Here are a handful of things we’ve been working on over the past few weeks.

• Improved Information Layout

Making sure that the pages inside of Jobber are presenting you with the information you need, when you need it, is an ongoing effort. There’s always room for tweaks and improvements — for example, a customer recently requested that property addresses should appear in the Quotes interface in Jobber. This makes perfect sense, so now they do!

• QuickBooks Online Integration Beta

QuickBooks Online Integration is currently in Beta, and if you’re interesting in giving it a whirl you should get in touch with us (info@getjobber.com).

• Property Address Field Defaults

We’ve made a tweak so that the default Country for a new Client or Property address in Jobber is the same as the last Property added to the system. This way you only need to set the Country for the first Client or Property you add to Jobber, and it will become the default from then on. Jobber also automatically geo-codes property addresses (as introduced in this blog post from February).

• Reporting Improvements

We’ve made a number of improvements to reports in Jobber, making it easier to visualize your invoicing and payment information. We have plans to add significantly to the reporting in Jobber in the near future, so stay tuned for more on that, and let us know what you would like to see in Jobber’s reporting at info@getjobber.com.

• Jobber Documentation Overhaul

The Jobber Documentation is a constant work in progress, as the software is constantly being updated, improved and added to. We’ve rewritten a lot of the content to be better organized, more readable and more concise. We’re also going to be producing tutorial videos for each major feature of Jobber, and have started with a 20 minute Quick Start Tutorial that we highly recommend Jobber users both new and old take a look at.

• Bigger Pagination Links

One of our customers uses iPad’s exclusively to work with Jobber, and they suggested that we bump up the size on the page links for lists. Great idea! We bumped up the sizing on a few other elements through the software as well so they can be used easier on tablet devices. Improving usability on mobile devices will be an ongoing focus for us.

• Quote, Job and Invoice Number Search

This one was long overdue — you can now search Quote, Job and Invoice numbers from each of the individual list sections under the main ‘Work’ navigation area.

• “End of Month” for Recurring Rules

We’ve made a lot of progress over the last little while with the various recurring functionality in Jobber. We’ve recently added the option to specify ‘end of the month’ for recurrence rules.

• Re-Open Paid Invoices

Sometimes you mark an Invoice ‘Paid’ by mistake… it happens. We’ve recently added the option to Re-Open an Invoice that’s been marked paid to help ease the pain when this happens.

Of course there are a whole bunch of other little things we’ve been working on as well, but these are some of the highlights.

Scheduling Improvements & Per-Visit Billing!

Most of our time, sweat, and tears lately have been going into a series of significant scheduling system improvements that are aimed at making scheduling in Jobber faster, easier to use, and require fewer clicks. These scheduling improvements form the foundation for Jobber’s Per-Visit Billing Functionality. This is easily the most requested feature right now, and we’ve been working hard to bring it to you within the next couple of weeks.

We’ll be making a full announcement about these scheduling improvements shortly, as the first set of changes are set to be deployed right away, so check back soon!

Sincerely,
The Jobber Team

Up to now if your customer needed a receipt for payment you had to send them a ‘Paid’ Invoice to indicate that the payment had been received. Proper receipts is something that’s been requested quite a bit, and it was time to fit it into the development schedule.

Printing a Payment receipt is easy — just click any Payment in the Transactions pane for a Client, and then click the little printer icon in the top right corner of the dialog box that pops up, as can be seen in the screen shot to the left.

We hope this little addition helps make things a little easier for some of you!

Sincerely,
The Jobber Team

Performance, Performance, Performance

We’re constantly working on improving the performance of Jobber. This past month has seen the most growth yet for us, and it’s presented a number of unique scaling challenges. The good news is that it’s been an opportunity to make Jobber even better. Read about how we got a 20X speed boost out of recurring tasks, making managing your contract jobs a lot quicker.

Cleaner Quotes, Jobs, and Invoices

Improving Jobber’s interface is always important, and based on some great feedback from our users, we’ve been tweaking our PDF templates as well as the internal presentation of Quote, Job and Invoice information. It’s important that you have all the information you need, without any additional mess.

Tweaking the New Scheduler

Last month, we launched the new scheduler, and the response has been great. This month saw a number of tweaks to the interface including zooming, and additions to the information that gets displayed. As a result of it’s increased usability, one of our customers has been using it to assign over 300 flower deliveries a day!

Fractional Unit Costs

A small change with a big impact — if you measure units in the thousands, fractions of a cent on your unit costs can really make a difference. Jobber now supports fractional unit costs, so if you’re cleaning 70,000 square feet of office space for instance, you can charge that fraction of a cent per-square-foot extra.

Payment Methods and Tracking

This month we put some work into the Billing & Payments functionality of Jobber. One of the things we’ve added is payment method tracking, as well as cheque number or transaction number tracking when recording your payments. Finding a payment again is easy using the search area in the main navigation bar at the top of every Jobber screen.

Client Notes Copy to Jobs

Attaching a note to a client in Jobber has been less than ideal — namely because they haven’t been visible from Jobs. If you wanted a note to show up for every Job you did for a Client (ex: dog in backyard), you would have to add it to every single one.

No more of that! Notes on clients now have a small checkbox allowing you to specify that a note should be automatically copied to every new Job created for that Client.

Scheduling Sheet Improvements

Two small items were added to the schedule sheets PDFs: The phone number of the Client, so your employees can call if needed without mobile access to Jobber, and any notes from the Job. These are in addition to any details you added directly to the Visit. We hope this will improve your communication with crews in the field, no matter what your Jobber work flow is.

Quickbooks Desktop Improvements

Quickbooks integration is continuously being worked on. We have some big ideas to improve performance and stability over the next couple months, but the last month was all about flexibility. You can now use Quickbooks jobs to import additional properties through the shipping address field. Jobber also makes smarter decisions about whether a customer in Quickbooks should be a company or an individual. Finally, we improved the error messages and authentication processes to help smooth out your first sync.

It should be noted that Quickbooks Integration is still a free beta. We’re always eager to learn more about how you’re using it, any problems you encountered, or features you’d like to see added. If you have any feedback about Quickbooks integration, drop us a line at: info@getjobber.com

Improving Email Delivery

As mentioned, this was our biggest month of growth yet. Over the course of the month the amount of email our system automatically delivers (reminders, quotes and invoices to your customers, etc…) grew so fast that we were starting to have some deliverability issues due to service providers thinking we were sending spam! We’ve taken a number of steps to solve this problem, including getting our own dedicated IP address for our mail server, and haven’t had a single deliverability issue since.

CSV Imports Supports Billing Address

Our CSV importer now supports additional columns for importing your customers’ billing addresses if present.

Big Exciting Shiny New Addon!

We’ve been working hard on one of our most requested features, and are just about to start beta testing it. You’re just going to have to stay tuned for the announcement about it in the next few days

All the best,
The Jobber Team

As a side note, for those of you that are unaware of LawnSite.com, it’s about the best resource out there for information and discussions surrounding the green industries, from landscaping and lawn care to irrigation and more. Topics vary from equipment and techniques, to business management, software and a lot more.

We spend quite a bit of time in the forums over at www.LawnSite.com listening to and participating in conversations about lawn care business management and how software can help. One of the members, KLC LAWN, is using Jobber from an iPad and had a great question (link to post)

“Is there a printer…Bluetooth or WiFi that doesn’t need to be connected to a network?”

In other words — How do you print from an iPad in the field? This is a great question, and I was shocked to find after some research that hardware support for printing on the iPad is unacceptably bad. It seems to have been completely ignored by hardware manufacturers, which is really a shame, and I really hope they fill this gap soon.

With the limitations in mind, there seem to be two possible approaches to printing in your truck.

1. AirPrint (this ultimately does not work well)
2. Netbook + Mobile Printer (this is the recommended approach)

AirPrint

The first option is to use a printer that’s compatible with something called AirPrint. AirPrint is a remote printing standard that some printers support — you’ll see it listed as a feature for the printer if it’s supported.

The deal-breaker problem with AirPrint is that it requires you to be connected to the printer THROUGH a wireless network rather than directly to the printer. This means that in order to set this up, you would need a power converter for your truck, a cheap wireless router, and the printer itself. That in itself isn’t SO bad, but the real problem is that while you’re connect to your new TruckNet wireless network to print off invoices or quotes, your internet connection through the mobile data network is shut off by your phone, cutting off the link to the internet.

Netbook + Mobile Printer

The second, and much better solution is to use a Netbook and a Mobile printer in your truck. This option involves a little more up front investment, but provides a much better overall system. A fully charged Netbook can be wired or wirelessly connected to a battery powered mobile printer, and tethered to your mobile phone for internet access. This solution frees you from any power cables and cords, gives you access to the full desktop Jobber interface if needed, and allows Quotes, Jobs, Invoices, and anything else you like to be printed right from your work vehicle.

A cheap Netbook can be had for around $350 (Acer Aspire One), and a Mobile Printer can be found for around $260 (HP OfficeJet 100).

Conclusion

While the Netbook + Mobile Printer route is a completely workable solution, it involves a $700 expense just to accomplish mobile printing. That seems completely ridiculous when you consider that you can walk around with an iPad or Android tablet generating PDF documents through Jobber all day long.

Of course, at the end of the day we prefer to see you helping to protect the environment by e-mailing your quotes and invoices, but we know that not all of your customers have an e-mail address.

It seems like this should be a total no-brainer for the printer manufacturers. Whoever’s the first to make printing from Tablets easy and convenient stands to gain a lot of very happy field-service customers. Am I right?

Am I missing something? Has anyone else figured out a sensible way to print from tablet devices from in the field? Let us know how you’re dealing with this challenge in the comments.

Sincerely,
The Jobber Team

Sources if you’re interested in further reading:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4356
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2656503?start=0&tstart=0
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2663260?start=0&tstart=0
http://www.ipadforums.net/airprint/25499-printing-without-network.html

We’ve spent the last few days rebuilding many aspects of our Task Management system, and it’s now faster than ever. Common actions like rescheduling a contract are performing over 20 times faster! The calendar and scheduler also received a number of significant performance updates.

We plan to improve the performance in every corner of the software over the next few months as we continue to grow. Until then, thanks for using Jobber, we’re sorry for our previous slowness, and we hope you enjoy our faster task management!

Sincerely,
The Jobber Team

One of the really cool templates we’re offering is the No. 9 Envelope template. This one works with both single and double window envelopes, meaning that you can say goodbye to printing labels or hand writing addresses!

You can read more about this new addition to Jobber in our Company Branding Documentation, and the templates can be found in the Branding section of your Account Settings.

We hope this nice little addition helps you to use Jobber to save even more time in your day!

Sincerely,
The Jobber Team

You asked for it, and here it is! Many of our green industry customers have requested a Chemical Application Tracking feature in Jobber, especially with Spring quickly approaching.

Many jurisdictions require chemical and pesticide use to be tracked and records to be kept for a period of time. Jobber’s new Chemical Application Tracking functionality makes this a snap.

This new Add-On can be found and enabled under the Add-Ons section of your account Settings, along with other helpful Add-Ons that you should check out.

Once enabled you’ll have access to a new Chemical Treatments section that allows you to list and sort all of your chemical applications. Also keep in mind that all of this functionality is available in Jobber Mobile as well — simply browse to www.getjobber.com on any mobile device.

You can add new Chemical Application Records from the Chemical Treatments page, from a specific Job or even just directly on a Client or Property.

The Chemical Application Record itself lets you track all kinds of useful information, but it’s up to you to check the requirements in your jurisdiction.

You can easily export all of your Chemical Treatments as a CSV file for use in Excel or to provide to regulatory authorities. We’re also working on reports that will provide the information in a format that is more standard for submission of this kind of information.

Learn more about the new Chemical Tracking feature in the Chemical Tracking Documentation.

We hope this new feature is arriving just in time for some of you landscapers out there to do your spring chemical applications, and that it help alleviate the manual burden of keeping your application records!

As always, don’t hesitate to let us know what you think, or get in touch with any questions you might have at info@getjobber.com, or simply submit a support request from inside Jobber.

Happy Jobbing!
The Jobber Team

We’ve been working very hard over the past year and a half to bring you the best business management software available for your field service company. This very exciting development is going to enable us to take Jobber to the next level, and we’re excited to be making the journey with you!

You can read the official Press Release for all the details.

First Things First

I want to take this opportunity to extend a sincere thank you to all of our fantastic customers and beta users who have provided us with the very best feedback a software company could ask for — both positive and negative — over the past many months. Without you Jobber simply wouldn’t be what it is today, so thank you.

How Does This Affect Me?

This new funding is going to allow us to really take Jobber to the next level. We’re extremely proud of everything we’ve achieved so far, but there’s so much more we want to do, and we want to do it as fast as possible. This investment is going to help us do just that.

There will be no change to the day-to-day operations of our company, and as a Jobber customer or user you’ll continue to experience the same great stability, features and support that you’re used to, only better!

Over the coming months you’ll notice more Add-Ons, more new features and a better user experience as we ramp up our operations. We have a big list of exciting things to work on to make Jobber even better for our customers, and we can’t wait to get started!

What’s Next for Jobber?

We’re getting to work on a whole bunch of stuff, starting…well, right now!

First off, we’re hiring — we’re looking to add some development muscle to the team so that we can move even faster. You can check out the postings on our Jobs Page.

Of course we also have a number of new features and Add-Ons in the works, and you can expect to see us rolling out a continuous stream of improvements and new functionality over the coming months, starting with Chemical Application Tracking for lawn care professionals, which will be available later this week.

We’re so excited about this next step for Jobber, and we couldn’t be happier with our new team and the experience that they bring. If you’re an existing customer, we can’t wait to show you what we have in store! If you’re new to Jobber, or thinking about signing up, there’s no better time to get on board than right now!

As always, if you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to get in touch at info@getjobber.com, and of course, we’re always eager to receive any feedback you have for us, so please don’t hesitate to get let us know what you’re thinking.

Sincerely,
Sam Pillar & Forrest Zeisler / Co-Founders of Jobber