Guide
What the technician carries, and why it decides adoption
Updated
Field service software is bought in an office and used in a basement plant room with no bars of signal, standing next to a running chiller. Almost every implementation that fails, fails there, and almost no evaluation tests it.
Talk to a specialist Five US HVAC platforms set against the EPA Section 608 duties, what each publishes, and the questions no vendor has answered in public.
The offline question comes first
If a technician cannot open the job, read the asset history and record refrigerant readings without a connection, the readings will be written on a hand and typed in later, or not at all. That single behaviour undoes the compliance case for buying the software.
None of the five vendors publishes its offline behaviour on the pages we read. Test it directly: put the phone in airplane mode during the trial, complete a job, then reconnect and confirm nothing was lost.
Seats, users and who actually pays
The vendors differ most here. ServiceM8 states plainly that it does not charge per user and gives unlimited users on every paid plan, billing job volume instead. FieldPulse charges per seat and separates full access seats from limited field seats, the only model here that prices an office administrator differently from a technician. ServiceTitan charges per technician.
For an HVAC firm with a large back office relative to its vans, those three models produce very different bills for the same company.
Certification belongs to the person, not the job
Section 608 certification is required to service, maintain or dispose of covered appliances, so it is an attribute of the engineer and it expires. The useful question is whether the scheduler knows: can it stop an uncertified technician being assigned to a covered appliance?
No vendor here publishes that. It is worth asking anyway, because the alternative control is a dispatcher remembering, and dispatchers are the busiest people in the building.
Photos are evidence, not decoration
Housecall Pro names photo reports and checklist automations on its Essentials tier at $149 a month. For compliance work a photo attached to an appliance with a timestamp is often the most useful record a technician can leave, because it survives disputes about what was found.
Check where photos are stored, whether they attach to the appliance or only to the job, and whether they can be exported. A record you cannot get out is a record you do not really have.