CRM for HVAC and Plumbing: The Van Needs a Schedule, the Office Needs a Pipeline

An HVAC or plumbing business usually needs field-service software first and a sales CRM second, if at all. The software that runs the vans schedules calls, dispatches technicians, takes payment on site and syncs invoices to the books; a sales CRM does none of that. Where a sales CRM earns its place is in the office: chasing replacement quotes, which are large and slow, and renewing maintenance agreements, which are small and recurring.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own page on 18 October 2026 as a US visitor. No product here was tested or given a score. Jobber, ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro have no affiliate programme with this site; Method, Bigin, Pipedrive, Zoho and HubSpot links can pay it.

The short answer for a three-van and a fifteen-van shop

A three-van shop should buy one field-service suite and use its built-in client list as the CRM. At that size the owner is the salesperson, the quotes are in the suite already, and a second system is a second place to forget to update. Jobber's cheapest self-serve plan prints $29 a month billed annually for one user, and its middle plan prints $149 a month on annual billing, covering a team of up to five.

A fifteen-van shop is different, because it usually has someone whose job is selling: replacement systems, commercial contracts, maintenance plans. That person needs a pipeline with follow-up tasks and reporting, and the suites mostly sell that as an add-on. Jobber lists its sales Pipeline as an add-on on its pricing page, which is a fair signal of where the boundary sits.

Field-service suites and sales CRMs run different halves of the day

Which kind of software owns each step of a service call. Based on the feature lists on each vendor's pricing page, read 18 October 2026.

Jobber's own feature list makes the first half concrete: a client hub where customers "approve quotes, check appointment details and pay invoices", request forms, online booking, two-way texting in the United States, Canada and the UK, automatic charging for recurring work, and "Sync with QuickBooks Online and Xero". Not one of those is something a sales CRM does natively.

What the suites print, and what they do not

Jobber publishes three self-serve plans, each priced by team size and by three billing terms: no commitment, a one-year commitment paid monthly, and billed annually. The page says annual billing saves up to 25%. ServiceTitan's pricing page, read the same day, prints no dollar figure at all, and Housecall Pro's page could not be read by our browser, so neither is priced here rather than estimated.

Jobber's printed prices per month, at the team sizes on its own page, 18 October 2026. US dollars.

Method sells a field-service product next to its CRM. Its pricing FAQ says Method:Field Services "starts at $15 per month for field crew technicians and $45 per month for dispatcher licenses", which is a per-person model rather than Jobber's team bands. Method is the one vendor on this page that sells both halves and integrates with QuickBooks by design.

Maintenance agreements are the CRM's real job

A maintenance agreement is the most valuable record an HVAC shop holds: it is recurring revenue, it puts a technician in front of an ageing system twice a year, and it is where most replacement sales start. It is also the record most likely to lapse quietly, because nobody owns the renewal date.

A sales CRM handles that well with very little setup: one pipeline for agreements up for renewal, a date field, and an automated task thirty days before expiry. The suites can bill recurring work automatically, which keeps paying customers paying, but the save call to a customer who has not renewed is a sales activity, and a pipeline with a named owner is where it gets done.

Whichever system holds the agreement, store the equipment with it: the age and model of each unit, the last visit date and what the technician noted. That record is what turns a routine tune-up into a well-timed replacement conversation, and it is the field most shops leave blank. A suite stores it against the property; a CRM stores it against the customer, which matters when the same customer owns several sites.

The replacement quote is the other case. A new system is a large ticket with a long decision, a comparison against other quotes and often a financing conversation. That is a deal in the plain sense, with stages and a probability, and it is the one place in a service business where a sales CRM's forecasting is genuinely useful.

Published prices for a five-technician shop

The comparison that matters is five technicians plus one office person, priced on the annual term. The trick is to notice that a sales CRM only needs seats for the people who sell, which is usually one.

Monthly cost for five technicians and one office user, as priced on the vendors' pages, 18 October 2026. Annual terms where printed.

Six people do not fit Jobber's five-user band, so the shop pays for the ten-user band, which is the most common budgeting surprise with team-banded pricing. Method's figures are starting rates and the FAQ does not say what they include, so treat its total as a floor and ask.

Adding a sales CRM for the office alone is cheap. Bigin Express is US$7 a user a month billed yearly and lists a QuickBooks integration for invoices and estimates; Pipedrive Growth is US$39 a seat billed annually and adds email sync and automations. Pipedrive lifted its annual prices after our September reading; Lite is US$14 and Premium US$59 today. The general sales CRMs are set out by team type on the sales CRM page.

Connecting a CRM to QuickBooks and the dispatch board

Two integrations decide whether running a suite and a CRM side by side works. The first is accounting: if the suite already syncs invoices to QuickBooks Online, the CRM does not need to, and adding a second sync risks duplicate customers. Pick one system as the owner of customer records and let the other read from it.

The second is the hand-off from sale to job. When a replacement deal is won in the CRM, someone has to create the job in the suite, and that step is where details get lost. A native integration or a Zapier connection that creates the job from a won deal is worth more than any CRM feature. The trade-offs of QuickBooks-first CRMs are set out in the note on CRMs that sync with QuickBooks, and the builder side of the trades in the construction note.

Zoho CRM lists a QuickBooks integration only from its Enterprise edition, at US$40 per user monthly on annual billing, while Bigin lists one on Express at US$7. For an office that wants QuickBooks-connected quoting without a scheduling system, that difference is the whole decision.

Edge cases: electricians, commercial work and the one-person shop

Electrical contractors split the same way, with one twist: more of their revenue can come from bid work for builders, which looks like a construction pipeline rather than a service call. A shop doing both should keep bids in a CRM pipeline and service work in the suite.

Commercial service contracts behave more like accounts than jobs, with multiple sites, a facilities contact and a contract value, and that is where a sales CRM's company records earn their keep. At the other end, a single plumber with one van needs neither a CRM nor a pipeline; the entry plan of a suite, or HubSpot's free tools for two users, holds every customer he will ever have.