A No-Nonsense Review of Jobber

Jobber is an operations management software for home service companies.

The app positions itself as all-in-one software for general contracting businesses and specialty contractors like HVAC, plumbing, and electrical services. It also serves general contracting businesses, cleaning services, and landscaping companies, among other home-services providers and field service businesses.

Jobber could be the perfect fit for your construction business, but it may fall short of meeting your needs. The best way to figure this out is to try the app — and we’ve done that for you, with detailed walkthroughs of Jobber’s onboarding process and key features, as well as its pricing, user reviews, and some viable alternative choices for software if you come to the conclusion that Jobber won’t get the job done (pardon the pun).

In this honest review, we’ll take a close look at what Jobber can do, to help you decide if the app has what it takes to be the all-in-one solution for your construction businesses.

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What Is Jobber?

Jobber, which is based in Canada, focuses on serving cleaning and “green” services like snow removal, landscaping, and tree care. Its similar focus on specialty trade services like HVAC and plumbing hints at its primary customers.

Last year’s article, “Jobber Raises $100M To Make It Easier To Find A Plumber”, says it all – Jobber is a business solution for mobile service companies first and general management software for everyone else (including construction companies).

Jobber Overview

Jobber’s general contractor business software offers the following features: 

• Drag-and-drop scheduling
• Client records with filtered search function 
• Requests tracking by day, completion, and schedule
• Quotes with conversion rate 
• Jobs dashboard with 30-day activity calculator
• Invoice batch creation and expense reporting 
• Timesheets with location timer

Sign-Up and Onboarding

Signing up with Jobber is easy.

Once you type in your email and create a password, the platform asks for your personal and business information.

On the second sign-up screen, you’ll be asked to choose your industry type from ‘Cleaning,’ ‘Green,’ ‘Hi-Tech,’ Trade,’ and ‘Others.’ ‘Construction and Contracting’ is the first industry listed under ‘Trade’.

The platform then collects information about your business size and estimated annual revenue.

After collecting your answers, Jobber asks why you signed up with its platform. The choices all sound like responses from home service professionals. We picked ‘increase efficiency’ as we’re endeavoring to represent construction managers and project owners in this review. 

The final question asks how you heard about Jobber.

Jobber then prefaces its Dashboard with an offer for its paid tiers, something that became a theme throughout our onboarding experience.

While the Dashboard loads, Jobber reminds you of its benefits and hints at an offer for a discounted paid subscription once again.

Finally, after multiple promotional pop-ups, the Dashboard comes into view and shows you the available features in the free trial.

The list takes you through key features, which are accompanied by demo actions and illustrations at the side. These include sending sample quotes, scheduling a job, automating job follow-ups, and other actions.

The Web App Experience – For Team Admins

Jobber’s dashboard presents an overview of job quotes, jobs, invoices, appointments for the day, and available integrations.

A conspicuous headline offer at the top encourages you to sign up for the paid tiers while a timer counts down.

The first widget from the left features a short welcome video for new Jobber users. (A walkthrough video of the platform’s features would have been more welcome, in our opinion. However, Jobber does include a ‘Show Me How’ video in its mobile onboarding.)

The second widget shows an overview of quotes, followed by jobs and invoices. At the bottom half of the page, you can see your appointments for the day, along with a list of available integrations.

On the right side, you can view Insights, which opens a pop-up menu showing overdue items, projected revenue, and an option for brand customization within Jobber’s communication tools.

A ‘Create’ button brings up a pop-up menu with shortcuts for creating clients, requests, quotes, jobs, and invoices. This is mirrored by the ‘More Actions’ button at the right side of the page. 

The Mobile Experience

The Jobber mobile app mainly functions as a scheduling tool and time clock for employees.

During its mobile onboarding process, the app presented a “Show Me How” guide to walk us through basic functions and features. These included managing quotes, automating client communication, following up on invoices, and setting up notifications.

Team admins can assign tasks and jobs, create quotes and invoices, and encode new client accounts on the app.

Employees clocking in simply have to click the timesheet icon at the bottom of the screen. The tiny clock begins to animate and rotate its hands to indicate that it is running.

Jobber also allows you to search quotes, jobs, invoices, and clients from the mobile app.

More construction companies trust Workyard for time tracking

Discover why

Jobber Key Features

How Scheduling Works in Jobber

Clicking ‘Schedule’ on Jobber’s web platform brings up a calendar with assignments and job details.

These can be filtered by:

• Tasks 
• Visits 
• Reminders 
• Events 
• Requests 
• Daily Visit Counts

The filter tool also allows you to view tasks by status (assigned /unassigned) and by days (show/hide weekends). The calendar can be viewed by month, week, day, map, and list of tasks.

The ‘More Actions’ button brings up the pop-up menu once again, with additional options of ‘More Visits’ and calendar synchronization.

Scheduled items can be edited by clicking on the entries and selecting ‘Edit’. 

The search function allows you to search assignments using text-based queries, which is handy when you are overseeing many projects and teams.

How Client Communication Works in Jobber

The Clients dashboard brings up ‘New Leads’ and ‘New Clients’ counters, a sensible feature for mobile services professionals and specialty contractors.

The dashboard also includes a dedicated search bar for Filtered Clients, offering deeper search functionality for users.

A widget on the right side offers synchronization with QuickBooks Online. Under ‘More Actions,’ options to import or export clients are available. 

How Requests Tracking Works in Jobber

You can create a request with customized forms and share or embed them on your company website.

Jobber allows you to search requests by date or status. It also provides an overview of new, completed, overdue, upcoming, unscheduled, archived, and other types of requests.

How to Manage Quotes in Jobber

Jobber’s dashboard provides an overview of quotes’ conversion rates. It also includes an activity counter which calculates sent and converted quotes in the past 30 days.

Again, you can search quotes using text queries in Jobber’s dashboard:

How to Track Jobs in Jobber

Jobber lists jobs by status and job type. You can search all jobs using text-based queries.

The Jobs dashboard also includes the activity counter (recent and scheduled visits).

Clicking on a job brings up job details, profitability, and line items.

Halfway through the page, Jobber encourages you to try its time-tracking solution.

The page also includes details on visits, billing, and internal notes and attachments.

How Invoicing and Reporting Work in Jobber

Jobber allows you to create individual or batch invoices and deliver invoices by batch. The page includes an overview of overdue and early invoices and draft invoices.

When creating an invoice, Jobber allows you to choose from active clients or from a new one.

Jobber offers an extensive array of report templates for mobile service professionals. These include Financial, Work, Client, and Expense reports.

Jobber dedicates a separate page for Expenses where you can track expenses by status and date. A link to Jobber’s help center is located on the right side should you need assistance and information about documenting expenses.

How Timesheets Work in Jobber

Jobber’s banner heralding its time-tracking solution reappears in the Timesheets section of the left menu.

The Timesheets section shows the tracked hours for the day. This is also viewable under ‘Timesheets’ in the upper left corner.

Clicking ‘Approve Timesheets’ opens a page showing employees’ logged hours, while clicking ‘Confirm Payroll’ shows team members’ tracked hours, expenses, and payment status.

Employees using the mobile time clock can clock-in and clock-out by tapping the Timesheet icon at the bottom of their screen. The icon is animated to run like a clock when the app is tracking.

On the web platform, the timesheets show GPS records of location at clock-in and clock-out.

Clicking the GPS in the timesheet pops out a record of vehicle trips between clock-in and clock-out.

We took Jobber for a road test and found the time clock sluggish on mobile data connection.

You could not zoom in or out of the map view using the typical pinch movement. We were able to zoom erratically by tapping on the map, but couldn’t zoom out using the same action.

The pointer itself changed size several times for no reason and didn’t track movement in real-time (based on mobile data connection during our test).

Integrating Other Business Apps With Jobber

Jobber lists available integrations under the ‘Apps’ section in the left menu. The platform integrates with popular systems like QuickBooks Online, DocuSign, CompanyCam, Gusto, Zapier, and CallRail, among others.

Jobber Might be a Good Fit for You If…

…you’re a mobile services professional. Jobber has scheduling and invoicing solutions built around this industry.

Its search functionality makes looking up jobs and clients a breeze. Its client communication tools are also built around the mobile service professional going house to house.

On-the-way text, client invoicing, and billing are all meant to streamline transactions with clients availing the services of trade professionals.

You Might Not Want to Use Jobber If…

…you want a project management solution outside mobile home services.

For example, if you’re looking for a dedicated time-tracking solution, Jobber’s offering might disappoint you.

The company announced its integration with FleetSharp for GPS vehicle tracking a few years ago. This means its GPS solution is not built in-house and may be prone to issues like the ones we encountered (lag due to spotty connection, erratic map actions, etc.).

Geofencing functionality is not a big part of Jobber’s solution. But if you think about it, Jobber’s focus centers on mobile service professionals who visit residential and commercial clients rather than work sites more commonly found in construction projects. Geofencing solutions, therefore, don’t make sense for Jobber’s primary client base.

More construction companies trust Workyard for time tracking

Discover why

Jobber Cost/Pricing

Jobber’s pricing system more than doubles its cost between tiers at every level. Connect has many more features than the basic Core tier, only lacking significant quoting features available in the top tier (Grow.)

Jobber Reviews

Jobber users say they appreciated the platform’s useful features, but wanted more robustness from its core functionalities.

iOS user Emisydet says Jobber has been great for a lot of tasks but felt they needed more firepower from its core features:

iOS user Emisydet says:

Great organizational tool ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 
We love Jobber for logistics, organizing routes, setting up and keeping track of one-off and recurring jobs, materials, chemical services, etc, … The reports are very basic and have a lot of room for improvement – hence 4 stars. When we download reports we have to heavily edit them in excel to be useful. …The report shortcomings might really matter to a small company using Jobber for all it’s capabilities – which we’re not. Hopefully improvements are on the way in that area.

The only GPS that syncs with Jobber is Fleetsharp/Linxup and Fleetsharp customer service is so bad that we switched back to Clearpath anyways. Therefore we lost that connection betw our trucks and Jobber. Hopefully they expand that also? Still highly recommend Jobber to any service business. It’s done a lot to improve our efficiency.

Android user Craig Crist says Jobber is great for clocking in and out, but the app should deliver more core functions like quick job editing and change orders:

Android user Craig Crist says:

⭐⭐⭐ 
New update is pretty annoying for management. Recent jobs show my oldest jobs in order. I can’t run through all of my approved jobs anymore. It feels like I became an employee of my own company with hardly any access to everything. App is basically good for clocking in and out and hitting the directions button. I would like to see full usability. Doing bids easily. Editing jobs easily. Change orders are clunky. Progress payments are impossible without making an invoice early. Web works good.

Capterra reviewer Roy B. says Jobber’s dashboard navigation and functionality were great, but customer support was not there when he needed it the most:

Capterra reviewer Roy B. says:

Customer service not very good ⭐⭐⭐
Overall: it was hard to not have the support needed to move from another platform. I’m thinking of moving back

Pros: Dashboard and functionality is great and easy to use once you learn it but there need to be a better onboarding process

Cons: customer service and onboarding was painful. no help no support

Our Score (and Why We Chose It)

Based on our sign-up and onboarding experience with the free trial, here’s how we scored Jobber:

Alternatives to Jobber

Jobber brands itself as an all-in-one operations management solution for contractors and home service businesses, but plenty of alternatives offer the same features found in its platform.

Check out our comprehensive article on the best Jobber alternatives for your business at the link below:

Top Jobber Alternatives: Other Apps to Consider

The Bottom Line

Jobber  is what it says it is — an “operations management software for home service companies.” Jobber is quite good at what it does (scheduling home visits, handling transactions with home service clients, etc.), but construction companies have never been high on its priority list.

Its time clock is a little unreliable and not meant to track employee clock-in and clock-out at dedicated locations like construction work sites. There is also scant mention of geofencing on Jobber’s website, aside from a dated press release. The GPS tracking for vehicle trips is outsourced and it shows in the app’s erratic behavior when in actual use.

If you’re looking for a time-tracking app and project management software built especially for your construction company, we recommend looking for a dedicated solution instead.

Construction managers and field workers love the Workyard mobile experience. Our iOS and Android apps are designed around the needs of field service managers in the construction business. Our web platform also simplifies scheduling, project management, payroll, and more. Try Workyard free for 14 days and see how we can simplify your field service management and make your business more profitable!