Your Software Already Costs $900 a Month. Before Anyone Runs It.

Nobody Adds It Up

Ask a contractor what their software costs and you will usually get a shrug and a number that is far too low. Not because they are careless. Because software never arrives as one decision. It arrives as eleven small ones, each of them reasonable on the day it was made.

The booking tool came first, because the phone was ringing during jobs. Then the accounting, because the shoebox stopped scaling. Then the job software, because two crews and a whiteboard is not a system. Then the review tool, the email tool, the form tool, the one your bookkeeper insisted on.

Every one of those was the right call. Added together they are a bill nobody ever approved.

The Actual Number

Here is what a working Ontario trades or service business is usually carrying:

• Job and dispatch software (Jobber, Housecall Pro or similar): $200 to $400 a month once you are past a single user
• Accounting (QuickBooks Online): $75 to $150 a month depending on payroll
• Booking and scheduling: $30 to $100 a month
• A website care plan from whoever built the site: $100 to $300 a month
• The small ones: forms, email marketing, review requests, storage, e-signature. Call it $100 a month, because it always is

That lands somewhere around $900 a month. About eleven thousand dollars a year, on software alone.

And that figure has a quiet condition attached to it. It is what the tools cost. It is not what it costs to run them.

The Part That Is Not On The Invoice

Software does not operate itself, whatever the marketing says. Somebody has to be the join between the pieces.

Somebody copies the booking into the job software. Somebody re-enters the customer into the accounting. Somebody notices the quote from three weeks ago that nobody chased. Somebody remembers that the certificate expires next month. That somebody is usually the owner, at nine in the evening, doing the work of an integration layer that was never built.

That is the real cost, and it does not appear on any invoice. It appears in the jobs that were not quoted and the evenings that were not free.

Why Consolidating Actually Helps

The argument for one system is not that it is cheaper. Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not, and anyone who promises you a saving without seeing your stack is guessing.

The argument is that the seams disappear.

When the booking, the customer record, the job and the invoice are the same system, nothing has to be copied from one place to another. The form submission is the contact. The booking is the job. The finished job is the invoice waiting to be sent. There is no handoff, so there is no handoff to forget.

That is the difference between software you own and admin you inherited.

What This Looks Like For Us

We build the website, and then we run it. Hosting, security, updates and changes are ours, so the site never becomes another thing on your list.

Where it becomes relevant to the number above is the step called Command, at $999 a month. That is the full CRM, the job pipeline from first call to finished, the invoicing, and a login where your customer can check their own job instead of phoning you to ask.

Read that against the $900 stack honestly. It is not a dramatic saving on the subscription line, and we are not going to pretend it is. What changes is that it is one system instead of seven, and that operating it is our job rather than yours.

If your evenings are currently spent moving information between dashboards, that is the trade actually on offer.

Do This Before You Talk To Anyone

You do not need a vendor to do the useful part of this. You need twenty minutes and a bank statement.

1. Open the last three months of your business account and card statement.
2. Highlight every recurring software charge. Every one, including the eight dollar ones.
3. Write down what each is for, in your own words. Not the product name. The job it does.
4. Circle any two that do the same job. There will be some. There always are.
5. Add up the total and divide by the number of hours a week you spend keeping it all in step.

Whatever you decide afterwards, you will be making the decision with a real number instead of a shrug. Most people find the total is roughly double what they guessed.

See what we charge, or tell us what you are running and we will tell you honestly whether consolidating is worth it for you. Sometimes the answer is no.