Switching to ServiceM8: what comes across and what does not

Short answer. Your clients, their contact details, your price list and your assets all come across. Your job history does not. Not some of it. None of it. There is no import for past jobs in ServiceM8, no add-on that adds one, and no partner who can conjure one for you. So the real question was never whether you lose the history. It is what you do instead, and which of the settings you pick in week one you are stuck with afterwards.

Two of them you only get to choose once.

Where I stand, because it matters on a page like this. I set ServiceM8 up for a living and I am certified and listed by them. I do not sell licences, so your subscription costs the same whoever you speak to, but ServiceM8 does pay its partners a share on clients they bring in. Not a neutral party, then. What I can do is tell you exactly what the import buttons do and do not do, including the bits that make my job sound unnecessary.

What comes across, and what does not

Here is the whole picture in one table, then the detail underneath.

Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

On that job history row, I wanted to be sure rather than repeat what everybody repeats. So I went through ServiceM8's entire help centre, all 711 pages of it, and listed every article about importing anything. There are routes for clients, for materials and items, for assets, for supplier quotes and supplier invoices, for online booking services, for photos from your camera roll, for contacts off an iPhone, and for calendar entries.

There is no article about importing jobs. Not a short one, not a hard one, not a paid one. The route does not exist.

The job history is the thing you actually lose

Let me give this its due, because it is the one place where a rival beats us outright and I would rather you heard it here.

Jobber's own comparison page says their onboarding specialists move your clients, jobs and open invoices, in three to five business days, with live onboarding included in the subscription. ServiceM8 has nothing like that, and no partner can add it. If ten years of job notes have to arrive in the new system intact, then a product that moves them is worth looking at, and I have written up how that comparison actually falls for a UK buyer including why their prices land in dollars.

For most trade businesses it turns out not to be the dealbreaker it feels like at 10pm the night before. Here is what I would do instead, in order.

Keep the old system readable for a year, and get the data out before you stop paying for it. Customers, items, open quotes, and if you can export one, a PDF of each client's job history. Do this while the old subscription is still live.

Use the client diary for the history that actually gets asked about. This is the trick nobody writes down. Every client card in ServiceM8 has a diary, and ServiceM8's own description of it is that any notes, photos or documents stored there will be available at the bottom of the job diary for all jobs for that client. So you drop in one PDF of last year's service record, and it rides along on every future visit to that address, automatically, for ever. It is not a full history. It is the two pages an engineer standing in a boiler cupboard actually needs.

Carry the knowledge, not the records. Client badges work the same way: activate one on a client and it switches on for every job created for them afterwards. ServiceM8's own examples are VIP and Bad Payer. Ten years of "do not send Dave to this one" lives in about forty badges.

Connect your accounts before you import a single thing

This is the mistake that costs the most and shows up the least, because nothing goes wrong until a fortnight later when you have two of everybody.

ServiceM8's own getting started guide puts it in this order: basic account settings and your quote and invoice templates first, then connect your accounting package, then import whatever is left. The reason is in their import article, which opens by telling you that you may not need to do it at all, because connecting to Xero, QuickBooks Online or MYOB imports your items and clients as part of the connection process. Their own answer to what is the best way to get contacts in is to connect the accounting package, with the spreadsheet as the fallback.

Upload your customer spreadsheet first and then connect Xero, and you have just created a duplicate for every customer who was in both. The fix exists and is tedious: Account, then Clients, tick each version of the duplicate, then Actions and Merge Clients, one customer at a time.

In the UK that connection means Xero or QuickBooks Online. MYOB turns up in ServiceM8's lists but their own guide limits it to Australia and New Zealand.

Three things the connection does that nobody warns you about:

• Every tax rate in Xero comes in. All of them, on integration, including ones you stopped using in 2019. Changes you make in Xero sync down to ServiceM8 within half an hour. Changes you make in ServiceM8 do not go back the other way, so the tidying has to happen in Xero. Do it before you connect, not after.
• Suppliers do not come across. A Xero contact who has had a bill applied to them counts as a supplier and is skipped. If they are both a customer and a supplier, they come in.
• New clients you create in ServiceM8 will not appear in Xero straight away, and this looks exactly like a broken integration. They are only sent over with the first approved invoice. Nothing is wrong. It is working as designed.

The price list is its own job. Account, then Materials and Services, then Bulk Import, using their template so the column headings match. One column decides whether your whole price book is right or twenty per cent out: Price Includes Taxes, set to yes or no. ServiceM8's help article explains that column in terms of GST, because they are an Australian company, so read GST as VAT and think carefully about which way your spreadsheet is written. There is more on which direction every piece of Xero data travels if your books are already on it.

The job number decision you only get to make once

ServiceM8 allocates job numbers itself. You cannot type your own. Their answer to whether you can set them manually is a flat no.

That matters more than it sounds, because by default your ServiceM8 job number becomes the invoice number in Xero. So if your old system left off at invoice 4,312 and ServiceM8 starts you at 1, your invoice numbering restarts at the exact moment your accountant least wants it to. Worse, you will start colliding with history: Xero requires an invoice number to be unique, and it counts deleted and voided invoices when it checks.

You can fix this, on day one, in one of three ways.

• Set your next job number. There is a wizard for it in the Online Dashboard. The catch, in ServiceM8's own words, is that you can only go to a higher number, and if you set it too high you cannot bring it back down. One shot, upwards only. Pick the number with your bookkeeper in front of you.
• Add a prefix or suffix. Four characters in total, letters, numbers, dashes and underscores. ServiceM8 specifically advise against encoding the year, the job type or the client, because those always cause trouble later.
• Hand numbering back to Xero. Settings, Preferences, Invoicing, Xero invoice number, and choose to let Xero issue the number. Cleanest option if your accounts are the system of record for numbering, which for most firms they are.

Whichever you choose, choose it before the first invoice goes out, not after.

Cutover month eats more job credits than you planned for

ServiceM8 bills by job credits, and the rule is one credit per job number. A job can sit open for ten years and still only count once, and a quote that turns into a work order does not spend a second credit. A quote you lose has still spent one.

Now apply that to a switch. Every open quote you re-enter costs a credit. Every job in progress that you carry over costs a credit. That is on top of your normal month. A firm doing sixty jobs a month that carries over forty open items needs a hundred credits in its first month, and Growing only allows 150 while Starter allows 50.

There is no buying your way out of it either. Only Premium Plus publishes a price for extra jobs, at 15p each. On Free, Starter, Growing and Premium that row on the pricing table is a dash. Go over your cap and you get another seven days of working normally, after which you are upgrading whether you planned to or not. Counting your open work before you pick a plan is about half the value of having somebody do the setup, and it costs nothing to do yourself if you would rather.

Two ways to take the sting out:

Do the build inside the trial. Fourteen days, every feature switched on, no card needed and no job cap worth worrying about. Your work does not evaporate when you subscribe, it is the same account.

Put planned maintenance in as reminders, not jobs. ServiceM8 only charges you for a reminder once it is converted into a job, so a year of annual services can sit in the system costing nothing until the work is real. Recurring jobs wake up a week before their date by default, and you can push that out to twelve weeks. If you run service contracts, this is the single most useful thing on this page. More on how credits really work in what the free plan does and does not give you.

Assets import in an afternoon and finish in a year

If you maintain equipment rather than just installing it, this section is the one that decides your plan, because Asset Management is badged on ServiceM8's own pricing page as available in Growing and up. That is £59 a month, not £25.

The import itself is straightforward. Account, Settings, Assets, Bulk Import, pick the client, pick the asset type, upload the spreadsheet. The restriction is the part that catches people out: one client and one asset type at a time. A customer with five different kinds of kit means five separate spreadsheets and five separate imports. The client has to exist first, and so does the asset type.

Then comes the real work, and I would rather you heard this from me than found it in month two. Every imported asset still needs a ServiceM8 QR label physically stuck on it, and the setup finished on site in the app: scan the label, set the location, take a photo. Until that is done you cannot run an inspection or service form against that asset at all. ServiceM8 say so plainly in their own article.

So three hundred boilers import before lunch, and take a full service cycle to actually become useful. The sane plan is to label each one on its next visit rather than booking a week of driving around with a roll of stickers.

Four errors that turn up in cutover week

These are the ones I would expect you to hit in the first fortnight with Xero connected. All four have fixes and none of them mean anything is broken.

• The invoice number must be unique. You will see an error icon in Invoicing, Awaiting Approval. The conflicting invoice is usually one you deleted or voided years ago, so when you search for it in Xero you have to tick Include Deleted and Voided or you will not find it.
• The contact has been archived. The exact wording is that the contact must be un-archived before creating new invoices or credit notes. If you tidied up Xero by archiving dormant customers, the first time you invoice one of them from ServiceM8 it stops. Restore it in Xero under Contacts, All contacts, Archived, and the error clears.
• A client you entered in both places gets overwritten. ServiceM8's note on this is worth reading twice: a client in ServiceM8 not yet synced with Xero will be overwritten if the same client is entered manually into Xero. During cutover, create each new customer in one place only.
• Zero value invoices never reach Xero. By design. If you raise one to close off a warranty call, do not go looking for it in your accounts.

A cutover that actually works

This is the shape I would use. It fits inside the free trial, which is deliberate.

• Before anything. Export everything out of the old system while it is still live and paid for. Customers, items, open quotes, and a copy of the job history per client if the export allows it.
• Day one. Start the trial. Company details, VAT, logo, then your quote and invoice templates. Templates first, because everything you send is wearing them.
• Day two. Connect Xero or QuickBooks Online, having tidied the tax rates in there first. Wait. Then check the Clients list before you do anything else.
• Day three. Import only what the accounting package did not bring. Anybody you invoice outside the books, the price list if your items live somewhere else, assets if you maintain equipment.
• Day four. The settings that are awkward to change later: job numbering, job templates, badges, queues for work that is waiting on somebody, and your forms.
• Day five. Run three real jobs all the way through. Quote, accept, schedule, complete, invoice, take a payment, and watch it land in Xero. Three real ones will teach you more than a fortnight of poking at it.
• Then subscribe, then clear up. Practice jobs stay in the account after you subscribe. Set them to Unsuccessful if you want the record, or remove them from Job History if they were nonsense.
• Pick a cutover date and mean it. Everything new goes into ServiceM8 from that morning. Work already underway finishes where it started. Running both systems properly for a month is the single most common way people give up in week two.

One timing trap worth knowing before you subscribe: you cannot trial the Forms add-on once you are on a plan. ServiceM8's own suggestion is to create a separate trial account just to look at the Form Store. So if certificates matter to you, look at them while you are still in the trial, not after.

Where the £1,000 fits, and the tap that loses it

ServiceM8 credits you 100% of what you pay a certified and listed partner for first time setup and training, capped at £1,000. So the £800 package comes back as £800, landing as credit against your subscription at half your plan price each month. On Growing that is £29.50 a month covered, for roughly 27 months.

Two parts of it bite specifically during a switch.

The clock runs from the subscription, not from the work. The claim has to go in within sixty days of the date you subscribed and the date of the earliest partner invoice, and the services have to be delivered and completed in full by the day you claim. So the plan of getting set up now and subscribing properly in the new year quietly throws the money away. Do the build around the subscription date.

Subscribe from the dashboard, never from the phone. ServiceM8's terms are blunt: the offer is not compatible with subscribing through your Xero or Apple account. Picture the moment. You are on site, setting the app up on your phone, the trial has just ended and it offers you a plan right there. One tap and the rebate is gone. The full rules, and the rest of what voids it, are here.

Two more things to be straight about. You pay the first month at full price while the claim is assessed, and the rebate does not stack with anything, so an approved claim replaces any discount you already had. It is ServiceM8's scheme and it runs on their terms, not mine. What I can tell you is that a setup and training package at £800 is the largest claim the cap allows you to make.

Before you cancel the old one

Get your data out first. Not next week, before you press cancel.

I will use ServiceM8's own rules as the warning, because they are published and I can show them to you. Cancelling a ServiceM8 subscription permanently deletes the account and everything in it. There is no read only option. You can download a backup, once every 24 hours, and even that is described as being for reference only, because it cannot be imported into another ServiceM8 account. Leave an account alone for 120 days and it may be removed entirely.

I have no idea what your current supplier does, and neither do you until you ask them in writing. Assume it works the same way and you will not be caught out.

Which brings me back to where this started. The import buttons are genuinely easy. You can press all of them yourself in an afternoon and plenty of people should. What decides whether you are still using the thing at Christmas is the order you did it in, the numbers you could only set once, whether the plan was sized against your real job count, and whether the system was built round how you quote rather than how the demo quotes. That is the part I sell, and now you know exactly what is in it.