HouseCall Pro suggested improvements

@Infinity brought something up in another thread about liking to see some improvements in HCP and I know @Patriotspwashing and @MrSparkleVA have mentioned some things too.

@Matt_Bonfiglio is on the forum now and maybe we can get some things improved with enough consensus.

I personally love HCP, but it’s not without flaws. If you use HCP do me a favor and let us know.

For starters I don’t like that the search feature doesn’t work in the activity feed and I don’t like the phone has to be on to upload photos. It won’t upload them in the background.

I have some others I’ll add later.

My biggest pain points have been:

  • no offline support, at all
  • no alerts for when an email is rejected
  • no real support for taking deposit payments

Other features I’d really like to see:

  • iPad app
  • ACH/ electronic check payments (edit: just found out this feature is in beta. They’re charging 1%, which I think is sort of high considering they’re probably paying a flat 50¢/transaction. But still better than 2.75% for CC)
  • more streamlined mobile UI- especially in regard to onboarding and scheduling customers. There are way too many different screens and button taps required to add a new customer and then create a job for them on the spot, imo.
  • iCal sync for iPhone
  • smoother contact importing from phone address book. They’ve had the same bug for ages that prevents you from using the search feature. What I’d really like to see is a dedicated group in contacts for HCP, so new customers are automatically added to the phone contacts.
  • customizable notification settings. I want the option to tweak which notifications are sent under which circumstances. For instance, I don’t want the customers getting a message “job started” when they just received an “on my way” notification 20 minutes prior. Or a “job finished” when I’m sending the invoice at the same time. Actually, for most circumstances, “job started” and “job finished” notifications seem pointless and annoying. But I still want the customers to receive booking and invoice messages, so I don’t want to turn off the notifications entirely.

And there are many more that I’d like to see. I’ve been kind of frustrated by their update schedule lately. I know they sort of have to focus on features that add revenue for them, like instant deposit and online booking. But there are still a lot of gaps in basic functionality that it seems like they’re never going to get around to.

Oh, one other huge one for me:

I want the ability to use my own email and phone number for messaging/emailing purposes.

I have never had an email get sent to spam or bounced back from my own address. But the housecall email server gets filtered on a semi-regular basis.

For text messages, what I’d like to see is the message automatically composed and imported to my messaging app. Then all it would take is an extra click to send that message from my number. BUT, I don’t think that will ever happen, since they make money off of their custom SMS numbers.

Nicely done Alex. Many of the things you mention are beyond my knowledge. I didn’t realize that when I clean out my Activities and Needs Attention notifications that my customers will be sent a notice that we’re finished. A week later that’s kind of outdated and superfluous. I DO find the search function glitch highly annoying when trying to find a prospect or customer further down the alphabet.

I am eager for August to get here so that I can learn how to get more from HCP. See you in Atlanta!

I don’t think there is such a message.

You can do that but it costs more because it’s only available on the higher tier plan, which also includes sending invoices by text.

@Matt_Bonfiglio fell off the grid so I’ve asked HCP for someone to let him know or send another rep to check out the concerns.

It was slightly off putting to have a rep here to plug the mastermind group only to disappear next day.

I tried it for about a week and decided to keep the customer factor. I like being able to run expense reports and profit and loss. It’ll keep up with my mileage when I remember to enter it. To me the customer factor offers more and is easier to use.

I posted this in the other thread, but i was able to search “mike” and this is what pulled up in my activity feed.

To address a few of these

  • Offline mode is something we are looking to add, but will take signifficant engineering effort. We add features based on demand and that is one that is not near the top.

  • the iPad app is something that also will require signifficant engineering effort, which is why we decided to optimize the webportal for a tablet in the meantime.

  • You can utilize iCal, it would just be done through Google Calendar.

  • Working on a way to add notification options in the mobile app

  • we by far out of any of the solutions out there add features the most frequently. We hang our hat on that.

I’m here. apologies for the absence. Been quite crazy the past week or so.