HVAC software: buy most of it, build the part that doesn't exist.
The HVAC software market is mature. Dispatch, scheduling, invoicing and inventory are solved problems with good products behind them. The question worth asking is what your operation does that none of them support.
Who this is for
An HVAC owner running three products that do not talk to each other, wondering whether one system could replace all of them.
What we hear from operators.
- You run three products that do not talk to each other.
- The thing that makes your business different is the thing nothing supports.
- Every vendor's roadmap answers a bigger customer's question, not yours.
- Switching costs keep you on a platform you have outgrown.
Do not hire us if
You need dispatch, scheduling, invoicing and inventory.
Buy a field-service platform. They are mature and good. Build only where your operation does something none of them model, and connect rather than replace.
If it is the other case.
Buy the ordinary parts
Dispatch, invoicing, payroll and accounting are commodity problems with mature products. Rebuilding them is money spent to end up behind where you started.
Build only where the difference lives
The maintenance-agreement model nobody supports, the quoting logic your estimators actually use, the integration between the three systems. That is where a build pays for itself.
The sprint decides which is which
A paid, fixed-scope engagement that produces a specification, a prototype of the riskiest piece, and a fixed quote. Frequently its most valuable output is 'buy this instead,' which you keep.
Buy or build, function by function
The buy-versus-build question is never answered for a whole business. It is answered per function, and for most HVAC contractors the answer is buy for everything on this list except one or two rows.
- Dispatch and scheduling
- Buy. ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber and FieldEdge have spent years on this and no bespoke version will catch up. Rebuilding it is money spent to arrive behind where you started.
- Invoicing and payments
- Buy, and connect it to your accounting rather than reimplementing it. This is a solved, regulated, boring problem, which is exactly the kind you should never build.
- Inventory and truck stock
- Buy if your platform does it adequately. Build only if you carry unusual stock or your counting process is genuinely different, which is rarer than most owners think.
- Maintenance agreements
- This is the row that is usually worth building. Agreement structures vary enormously between contractors, most platforms model one shape, and the gap is where the spreadsheet appears.
- Quoting and proposals
- Depends entirely on whether your estimators follow the platform's logic or work around it. If there is a spreadsheet involved, the platform is not modelling your process.
- The integration between them
- Almost always build, and it is almost never scoped. Three products that each work well and do not talk are the most common reason an owner ends up re-keying data.
Where we stand
NovraScale does not sell an HVAC product and has no HVAC client. It builds custom systems for operations that have outgrown what they can buy, including a trades contractor working the same dispatch-and-quote pattern.