ServiceTitan, set up for how you actually run.
Most contractors are not underusing ServiceTitan because they are lazy. They were sold a large system, given a short onboarding and left to configure it while running a business. The result is reporting nobody believes and a team working around the software instead of in it.
Independent. Scoped in writing before anything starts. Part of Run better.
- Sold threshold$0
Every completed job counts as converted, so close rate and conversion are fiction.
- Include in payrollOff
New technicians default to off, and vanish from payroll and job costing.
- Payment termsNone
An invoice with no term has no due date, so it never appears in A/R aging.
- Invoice statusPending
Only posted invoices reach payroll and accounting reports. Revenue looks lower than it is.
The reports are all there. Nobody believes any of them.
A commercial mechanical contractor, three trades, fifteen in the field. ServiceTitan went in three years ago. Everyone was handed a login and told to get on with it.
Since then: someone changed the business units halfway through a year and orphaned a pile of jobs. The accountant switched off the QuickBooks sync after bad data pushed through. The price book came across from the old system and never got fixed, so technicians build estimates by typing prices in by hand. Forms were built by whoever was most comfortable with software rather than whoever understood the work. There are invoices from January that were never sent.
Every one of those is fixable. None of them is the actual problem. The actual problem is that the owner cannot open a report and act on it, so the company gets run on instinct and spreadsheets while paying for a system built to replace both.
What changes when it’s set up properly.
Outcomes, not a feature list. Which of these apply depends entirely on what discovery finds, and we would rather tell you that than promise all six.
Reports you are willing to run the company from
A booking screen a new CSR can use on day one
Gross margin per department that accounting agrees with
Payroll that stops being done by hand
Invoices that leave when the work finishes
Recurring revenue that renews itself
We diagnose the operation before we touch a setting.
A bad workflow configured faster is still a bad workflow. The quickest way to waste a ServiceTitan engagement is to start changing settings before understanding how the company is supposed to run.
So every finding gets sorted into one of three buckets, and we tell you which, including the ones that are uncomfortable to hear.
- Configuration
- ServiceTitan is set up wrong. This one is ours to fix.
- Process
- There is no agreed process to configure. Settings will not help until there is.
- People
- The system and the process are both fine. Nobody is following them.
You cannot solve a management problem with another ServiceTitan setting, and we will not sell you one that pretends otherwise.
Four layers, in this order.
Every number a business manages by comes from a choice somebody made in a dropdown. These are the dropdowns, coarsest first.
Business units
The coarsest cut of the company, and the one every report filters by. Built so revenue and the costs that made it land in the same place.
Job types
Why the call exists. Chosen by a CSR under time pressure, so fewer and clearer beats complete and precise, every time.
Tags & custom fields
What ServiceTitan will not capture on its own. Each one needs a report it appears in, or it is a note pretending to be data.
Workflows
Whether anyone does it the same way twice. This is where accuracy is won or lost, and it takes longer than the other three combined.
If most of your work is commercial.
ServiceTitan was built residential-first, and most of the advice written about it still assumes a homeowner and a one-visit membership. That leaves commercial contractors working around a system nobody configured for them.
Almost none of it needs a different platform. It needs the commercial pieces switched on and set up.
- Work orders arriving by email and being retyped by hand, and what can be done about it
- Invoicing that happens twice, once in ServiceTitan and once in the customer's portal
- Net 30, 60 and 90 terms, and the real lag between completing work and sending the invoice
- Service agreements rather than memberships, which is the right object for negotiated commercial contracts
- Per-agreement profitability, so you know which contracts are worth renewing
- Ticket data good enough that a facilities manager can see what you did without phoning to ask
How it starts.
Nothing is configured in the first fortnight. That is deliberate, and it is the part that makes the rest worth doing.
Mutual NDA
Read-only access
Discovery
Findings, in three buckets
A 30/60/90 plan
Pricing is scoped on a growth call and confirmed in writing before any work begins. Where a paid ServiceTitan add-on is genuinely the right answer we will say so, and be clear that the money goes to ServiceTitan rather than to us.
Questions worth asking.
Are you a ServiceTitan partner or a certified consultant?
No, and we would rather say so than let you assume it. Fieldstone is independent. We have run ServiceTitan as an operator for eight years and implemented it in more than one business, which is a different thing from a vendor certification. It also means we have no incentive to recommend a module you do not need.
What does it cost?
It is scoped on a growth call and put in writing before anything starts, because a 15-technician commercial shop with a broken accounting sync is not the same job as a residential company that wants better dashboards. Where a ServiceTitan add-on is genuinely worth buying we will say so and tell you roughly what it costs, but that money goes to ServiceTitan, not to us.
Will you make changes without telling me?
No. Anything structural gets exported, shown to you and agreed first. Duplicate records are exported to a spreadsheet for you to confirm before anything is merged, and nothing that touches the accounting sync happens without your accountant in the room.
Our business units are a mess. Can you fix them now?
Almost certainly not now, and that is the honest answer rather than the quick one. Restructuring business units mid-fiscal-year orphans jobs and destroys year-over-year comparison, which is usually what went wrong the last time somebody had a go. We document it, then do it at the fiscal year boundary.
Does the price book have to be part of this?
Not necessarily. A pricebook rebuild is its own project with its own timeline, and folding it into a 30-day scope is how both jobs end up half-done. We will tell you what state yours is in and what fixing it would take, and you can decide whether it happens now or next.
We are mostly commercial. Is ServiceTitan even right for us?
It was built residential-first and the commercial side is younger, which is a fair criticism. But most of what hurts commercial contractors is configuration rather than the software: service agreements never set up, invoicing lag on net 60 terms, ticket data too thin to defend the work. Those are fixable without changing platforms.
Will this improve our TitanAdvisor score?
Usually, as a by-product. Several of the highest-scoring items are things worth fixing anyway, such as pricebook costs, invoice templates per business unit and job type setup. Worth knowing that the score can also fall on a quiet week, because part of it measures usage over a rolling window rather than setup.
What if the real problem is not ServiceTitan?
Then we say so. Plenty of what gets blamed on the software is a process nobody wrote down or a standard nobody enforces, and no setting fixes either. We sort every finding into configuration, process, or people, and we will not sell you configuration to solve a management problem.
Start with what is actually wrong.
Bring the account and the frustrations. We will tell you which problems are configuration, which are process, and which are neither, before anyone talks about scope or price.
ServiceTitan is a trademark of ServiceTitan, Inc. Fieldstone is an independent consultancy and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a certified partner of ServiceTitan, Inc. We are paid by you, which is why we will tell you when a module is not worth buying.