ServiceM8 for gas engineers

Short answer. ServiceM8 runs a gas business properly, and the thing that decides your plan is not your job count. It is paperwork. You can buy a CP12 and run it on any plan, including the free one. The moment you want that certificate carrying your own logo, you are on the £59 plan, and there is a second lock on it that almost nobody mentions.

Where I stand, because it matters here. I set up ServiceM8 for a living, certified and listed by them, and they pay partners a share on clients we bring in. I do not sell licences, and my fee is identical whatever plan you land on, so I have no reason to talk you up a tier.

ServiceM8 has no page for gas engineers

I checked this morning. Their UK industries index lists nine trades: appliance repair, cleaning, electricians, HVAC, lawn care, locksmiths, pest control, plumbing and pool service. No gas page, no heating page, and the word gas appears on it zero times. Their help centre runs to 716 pages and not one has gas in the address.

So you end up on the plumbing page, which promises gas work outright. Under Popular Features: "PDF forms & reports. Complete plumbing & gas certificates and reports in the field." Step four of their own job walkthrough: "Produce PDF plumbing & gas certificates electronically." Directly above both it prints the plan ladder, Free at £0 and Starter at £25 included.

What it never says is which plan any of that needs. I searched it: zero occurrences of "Available in", zero of "Asset", zero of "Form Store". So you read it top to bottom, pick Starter because 50 jobs a month fits, and find the gate later. The same thing catches electricians out, written up in job management software for UK electricians.

The two locks on a gas certificate

Everyone writes about the first lock. Here is both.

Lock one is your plan

ServiceM8's pricing FAQ, read this morning: "Customers on all plans (even the Free plan!) can buy & use any Form on the Form Store... If you want to build your own Forms... you'll want the Growing plan (or higher)." The comparison badges agree: Electronic Forms and Asset Management both read "Available in Growing & Up", which is £59 a month. Running a form you bought is not gated. Building or changing one is.

Lock two is the publisher, and the plan does not beat it

From the help centre article on buying forms, read today, and this is the sentence to take away: "For purchased forms, the publisher must also allow template editing and downloading. Upgrading your plan does not unlock a publisher's locked template, and an unlocked template does not override Starter's restrictions."

Read that again if you are about to go up to £59 a month to put your logo on a certificate you already paid for. If whoever wrote that CP12 locked the Word template, paying ServiceM8 more does not open it. Check the editing permissions on the listing first. It is free.

There is a middle ground almost nobody writes down. Some bought forms carry what ServiceM8 calls Customisable Fields, boxes the author left open for things like a contractor licence number, and their words are that "you can change these values on Starter without downloading, editing, or uploading the underlying document template". So your registration number may need no upgrade at all. Your logo in the header almost certainly does.

One more line from the same article, because it changes what anyone can sell you: "This also applies if a ServiceM8 Partner creates a custom form for you." A bespoke gas form built by a partner still needs you on Growing or higher. If someone quotes you a custom CP12 while you sit on the £25 plan, settle that before money changes hands. Custom forms sit outside my setup and training packages and are quoted separately.

What the gas forms cost, in dollars, today

I counted the Form Store this morning: 211 forms. Both the pricing FAQ and the help centre still say "over 250", so trust the store page. Its header is honest about the model: "Forms and documents have a one-off charge". Every price in it is in US dollars, on the UK page, with no pound sign anywhere in the store.

Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

Oil and solid fuel are covered too: the CD10 commissioning report and the TI/133D oil tank risk assessment at $99.00, the CD12 landlord oil check and CD14 warning notice at $89.00, and the CD80 and CD81 solid fuel reports at $114.00.

There is no gas filter in the store. The industry list runs appliance repair, cleaning, electrical, fire safety, HVAC and refrigeration, pest control, plumbing, pool care, property management, security and solar energy. Gas hides under plumbing and HVAC, so search by form name or CP number rather than browsing.

And I have not opened any of these forms, so I will not tell you one satisfies anything. The CP12 listing's blurb says it lets you "issue compliant CP12 Gas Safety Certificates" and is "fully editable for Gas Safe engineers". That is the author talking, not ServiceM8 and not me. What you can do, free, is hit Preview, which walks you through the form as though you were stood at the boiler and shows you the finished PDF. Do that before you spend $124.

The annual cycle, and the one setting that matches the law

This is the part worth the subscription, and the part most accounts have set up wrong. A landlord's duties are specific and HSE sets them out plainly. An annual gas safety check on each appliance and flue, every 12 months, by a Gas Safe registered engineer. The record kept for two years. A copy to each existing tenant within 28 days, and to any new tenant before they move in. And since the 2018 amendment regulations the check can be done up to two months early while keeping the original deadline date, so the anniversary stops drifting forward every year. Those are the landlord's duties, not yours. Being the engineer who makes them easy to meet is the work that comes back every year without anybody asking for a quote.

Recurring Jobs and Reminders works on every plan including the free one. A recurring job needs a job template first, then you set the customer, the pattern and the end date from the Dispatch Board.

The setting to know is the activation window. Recurring jobs create and schedule themselves a default of one week before the recurrence date, and you can push that to a maximum of 12 weeks in Settings, Preferences, Recurring Jobs. Set eight weeks and the job lands in front of you inside the two month early window HSE allows, so you can do the check early and keep the original deadline. One setting, chosen once, and a round of 200 annual checks stops being something you chase in January.

Reminders are the cheap half. ServiceM8's own answer: "No, you will only be charged for reminders that are converted to jobs." A book of annual services can sit there costing nothing until a customer says yes, which on a service round is the difference between a sensible plan and the next tier up. Not something I would leave to chance during a build.

One record per boiler, not one per visit

If you service the same appliances year after year, Asset Management changes how the business runs. It sits on Growing at £59 and up, the same gate as the forms, so one upgrade buys both. Each boiler, cylinder and catering appliance becomes its own record with its own history.

The genuinely useful bit on site, which I have not seen written down anywhere else: when you complete a form against an asset, each question shows the history of past values for that asset. ServiceM8's own examples are a measurement changing over time, or whether a consumable got replaced last service. For a boiler that is last year's readings beside this year's empty box, on your phone, in the airing cupboard. The finished form lands in the asset history and the job diary, and next time you open the same asset type ServiceM8 suggests the same form.

Two things to plan for. Assets do not show in the app until the job carries an Asset badge, which catches people out on day one. And every asset needs a physical ServiceM8 QR label applied on site, setup finished there, before a form will run against it, including bulk imported ones. The labels are a unique QR code in UV resistant ink on PVC, ordered from Settings, Assets, Order Labels, and the help page prices them "usually less than 15 cents per label", quoted in cents on a page a UK reader is reading. Nine samples can be downloaded to try it first.

One thing about those labels is worth real money. The customer can scan one themselves, see that appliance's history and report a fault straight to you. On a block of flats or a pub group, that is what stops the next callout going to whoever ranked first on Google.

How job credits land on a gas round

ServiceM8 charges a flat monthly fee by job volume with unlimited users on every paid plan, which for a firm with engineers plus somebody in the office is the right way round. Read this morning, the UK ladder is Free at £0 for one user and 30 jobs a month, then Starter £25 for 50, Growing £59 for 150, Premium £119 for 500 and Premium Plus £269 for 1,500 or more. Prices exclude VAT and ServiceM8 issues reverse charge invoices.

A credit is more generous than it sounds. ServiceM8's wording is that a job "could be kept open for 10 years and it would still only count as one job credit", so a boiler service that becomes a repair quote and two return visits is one job. Two things bite, though. A quote you lose has still spent a credit. And on Free, Starter, Growing and Premium you cannot buy extra jobs at all: only Premium Plus publishes a price, at 15p. Go over and you work on as normal for seven days, then you are asked to upgrade. The rest of the sums, including the card fees that often outgrow the subscription, are in what ServiceM8 really costs in the UK.

Picking the tier is the easy part. Making the certificates, the job types and the annual reminders line up is what decides whether you are still using it next winter. That is the job I do, at a fixed price.

What ServiceM8 will not do for a gas business

Nothing to do with Gas Safe. I have found no part of ServiceM8 that notifies a scheme, lodges a record or talks to the Gas Safe Register, and their 716 page help centre does not mention gas once. Anything that has to go somewhere official, you are still sending yourself.

No purchase orders. Their own answer is flat: "ServiceM8 does not have built-in functionality to create and send purchase orders to suppliers." Merchant collections stay a paper job unless you buy a third party add-on.

No inventory system of its own. It does track stock levels, which half the comparison pages get wrong, but only through a connected Xero, QuickBooks Online or MYOB account, and the count moves only after a synced invoice containing a tracked item is processed. No van stock, no supplier ordering.

No Sage. Xero, QuickBooks Online and MYOB only. Their words: "ServiceM8 does not have an integration with Sage." If your books are on Sage and your accountant is not moving, that is close to a decision on its own.

No history import. Your customers and price list come across. Your past jobs do not, and there is no bulk import for them anywhere in the product. The workaround is the client diary, and the cutover is worth planning properly: what comes across when you switch, and what does not.

On phones, ServiceM8's own pages have said since September 2026 that the Android app has almost all the same functionality as the iPhone one, so complete a form on a real handset during the trial before deciding: does ServiceM8 work on Android.

The £1,000 that pays for the setup

ServiceM8 runs an official Setup and Training Rebate. If a partner who is both certified and listed in their Partner Directory does your setup, they credit you 100% of what you paid that partner, capped at £1,000. I am certified and listed, which is what makes an invoice from me qualify.

So the £800 setup and training package is not £800 spent. It is £800 back as account credit at 50% of your plan's base price until it runs out. On Growing at £59 that is £29.50 a month, so £800 covers roughly 27 months at half price. On Premium, about 13 months.

Three conditions do the damage. You must subscribe through the online dashboard, because subscribing inside the iPhone app voids it, as do third party app stores. The claim goes in within 60 days of both subscribing and the earliest invoice date, so being set up long before you subscribe breaks it. And it stacks with nothing: an approved claim replaces any active discount you hold. Full rules in the rebate explained properly.

So which plan, and when

If you are torn, do not read another page about it. The trial is 14 days with every feature on and no card required, so buy nothing: preview the CP12 in the store, build a dummy boiler as an asset, stick a sample QR code on it and run a form against it. An afternoon of that tells you more than any comparison will, this one included. What it cannot tell you is whether the thing has been built round how you quote and when the reminders fire, and that is what decides whether you are still using it next winter.