Questions, answered.
Everything below is answered somewhere in the eight chapters too — this page is all of it in one place, grouped by where in the job it comes up.
What is RSP?
ReadyServicePro is field service software for home services — one system that carries a job from first contact to money in the bank. It captures leads into a single Inbox. It builds estimates from your rate book, and collects the deposit when the customer accepts. It makes scheduling across office, crew and customer very simple; and it runs the job from the crew’s phone, with or without a signal - including job forms and checklists, time and materials, parts requests, etc. It handles the invoicing, and takes payment directly into your own account — then books all of it to QuickBooks (if you use it). On top of everything sits an AI assistant that makes sure nothing falls through the cracks.
The long version is how it works — every capability, first call to money in the bank, in eight chapters.
An assistant that knows the whole operation
What does the AI assistant actually do?
Two things. It writes a brief of where the business stands — leads, active work and scheduling, each narrated in plain sentences with links to the place you can act — and it rewrites that brief as your data changes. And it answers questions about your own operation from live data: customers, schedule, estimates, slips, parts and money.
How do I know what it tells me is right?
Because the judgment isn’t left to the model. What surfaces in the brief, and in what order, is decided by deterministic rules — plain, testable code — and the AI only writes the sentences. When you ask a question, it looks the answer up in your live data and shows each lookup as a visible, ticked step, so you can see where the answer came from.
What can I ask it?
Anything you could work out yourself from your own records: what’s in the inbox, what’s still unscheduled this week, what a job was billed at, which parts requests are open. And “how do I…” questions — those it answers by quoting the same help pages a person would read, rather than improvising from memory.
Who can ask my assistant for answers?
TODO — answer pending. This chapter does not yet state who inside the business can ask the office assistant for answers.
Is this the same assistant my customers talk to?
No. The assistant in this chapter works for you, in the office — the brief and the answers. The assistant on your website talks to prospects and captures leads, and it answers from the knowledge base you wrote, not from your books — so it can’t promise something you never put in writing. They are kept separate on purpose.
Every lead captured, day and night
What happens to an inquiry that comes in at two in the morning?
It is captured, answered and filed while you sleep. The chat or the voice agent has the conversation from your own knowledge base, collects a name, a number and a description, judges how urgent it is, and asks for photos if the problem is something you’d need to see. The whole thing is waiting in your Inbox when you open the dashboard.
Do I have to replace my website or my contact form?
No. The chat bubble is one line added to whatever site you already have, and your existing contact form can feed the same Inbox without being rebuilt. Running both side by side is normal — some visitors want to talk, some want to type and leave. If you don’t have a site at all, we build one with capture wired in.
Does a website inquiry create a customer record?
Not until a person accepts it. Inquiries wait in the Inbox as inquiries: no customer, no job, no paperwork. That is deliberate — a busy website would otherwise fill your client list with people who were never going to book. Accepting one is a single action, and it carries everything already collected into the job.
Can AI answer my phone too?
Yes — an AI voice agent can pick up 24/7, have the conversation from the same knowledge base the website chat uses, and file the inquiry in the same Inbox with the caller’s details attached. It is set up with you rather than by you, and it is entirely optional — not everybody wants AI answering their phone, and nothing else depends on it.
How does the chat know anything about my business?
From your knowledge base — a short list of topic-and-answer entries you fill in once, covering your service area, your hours, what you do and don’t take on, and how you charge. The chat and the phone agent answer from exactly the same entries, so they can’t contradict each other, and they can’t promise something you never wrote down.
Estimates in minutes, not evenings.
How long does an estimate actually take?
Minutes, once your rate book is loaded — which is something we do with you when you start. Line items autocomplete from your own catalog, similar past jobs come in as a starting point, and the customer-facing scope drafts itself from the lines you chose. The first one takes the longest. Most of the rest are a few clicks and a read-through.
Can the customer see what the job costs me?
No. Your cost, your markup and your margin never appear in any customer-facing view. What the customer sees is the level of detail you picked for that document — a plain summary, category totals, or full itemization — and the totals are identical whichever one you chose.
Can I offer extras without a second conversation?
Any line can ride on the estimate as an optional add-on, priced and described, with a box the customer ticks on their own copy. Whatever they take folds into the accepted total, the contract and the invoice automatically. You make the offer once, at the moment they’re already deciding, and you find out the answer without either of you booking a call.
Do I have to take a deposit?
No — deposits are per estimate, with a company default behind them, and you can set the percentage or leave it off entirely. When you do ask for one, accepting the estimate flows straight into paying it — card, bank transfer, or a committed check — so the job is funded before it reaches the schedule rather than after somebody remembers to ask.
Can I send it from my own email instead?
Yes. Every send step offers both: deliver it from ReadyServicePro under your company’s identity, or open the same pre-written message in your own Mail or Messages app and send it from the account you’ve used for twenty years. Both live on the same send step, and neither is the workaround.
Schedule it once, and it’s on everyone’s calendar.
What stops a job from being forgotten?
Work that has been accepted but not yet scheduled sits on a visible bench next to the calendar, grouped by type, until somebody gives it a date. It is not in a folder, an email or somebody’s head. The AI assistant’s brief raises it too, so an unscheduled job that has been sitting a while comes and finds you.
Does this land on my technicians’ real calendars?
Yes. Scheduling a job sends each booked technician a standard calendar invitation that lands in Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook and blocks the slot — nothing to install or connect on their end. Reschedule and it updates the same event rather than stacking a duplicate; unschedule and it cancels. Customers never receive one — invitations are for your team only.
Can I see every crew’s week in one view?
That is what the board is — one lane per technician, at four zoom levels from a single day to a month, with everything the company has on: installs, service calls, site visits and inspections together. An agenda list sits one tap away for when you’re reading it on a phone rather than a monitor.
What about jobs that need two people, or more than a day?
Booking takes a lead technician plus any helpers, so a job that needs a second set of hands is scheduled as one job rather than two. Multi-day installs land on every assigned technician’s lane across every day they run, and extending, shortening or re-crewing partway through reconciles the remaining days instead of rebuilding them.
Does my customer find out when I schedule them?
Only if you want them to. Scheduling can post the date and the assigned technician to the customer’s own private job page, and that is a decision per job rather than something that happens automatically. Nothing about your internal scheduling — who else is booked, or what else is on — is ever visible to them.
Run the job from the phone in your pocket
What happens in a basement with no signal?
The app keeps working from a local copy of that technician’s week ahead — jobs, scope, contacts, their slips and your whole rate book. They check in, log hours and materials, request parts and add notes as normal, and every action queues on the phone and sends itself in order, exactly once, when coverage comes back.
Do the hours a technician logs get re-typed in the office?
No. Check-in and check-out pre-fill the labor line on the slip, the estimate’s materials are already on it, and submitting posts the whole thing to the job’s record. The office reviews what the field logged rather than reconstructing it, which is the difference between closing a job in minutes and closing it on a Saturday.
Can a technician’s photo reach my customer by accident?
No. Everything logged in the field is internal by default — the share-with-customer box is unchecked on every photo, comment and note. Something becomes visible to the customer only when somebody ticks that box. The default is the safe direction, so the crew can write notes to the office the way they’d say them out loud.
What if a slip comes in after the job is closed?
It still lands. A late slip is flagged as logged after close and raises a louder alert to the office, so the true cost of the job changes to match what actually happened instead of the slip vanishing. Slips stay editable up until closeout, and admins can correct actuals where a correction is genuinely warranted.
How long can it run without coverage?
It is built for a workday, not a cabin week. The snapshot covers the tech’s week of assigned work, and the queue holds a full day of check-ins, slips, parts requests and notes comfortably. Photos and forms are the two things that wait for a signal, and the office side of ReadyServicePro has no offline mode — this is a field feature.
Forms and checklists, automated and transformed
Can ReadyServicePro recreate my inspection form?
Yes. Photograph it — up to six photos, page by page — or upload it as a PDF of about fifteen pages. ReadyServicePro rebuilds it as a phone-friendly form: the same sections, fields and checkboxes, arranged to be filled with a thumb rather than cloned pixel for pixel. You review the result side by side with the original, edit anything, and nothing saves until you say so.
What if the manufacturer or the county requires their own form?
That is exactly what this is for. Most job paperwork is designed by somebody else — the inspector, the manufacturer, the utility, the general contractor — and you don’t get to change it. Photograph their form once and the crew fills it on site from then on. The completed submission prints as a clean document to hand over or file with whoever required it.
Can I make my own checklists?
Yes, three ways: describe one in a sentence and edit the draft that comes back, build one field by field from a blank page, or photograph a paper checklist you already use. Attach a checklist to a job and the crew sees it in the field app with the rest of the job, fills it on site, and the submitted copy lands on the job’s record.
Does editing a form change what’s already been signed?
Never. A submission is a frozen snapshot, kept against the version of the form it was filled on, so editing the template changes future fills only. There are no quiet edits to a signed document either: a correction is an amendment — a new copy pre-filled from the original — and both versions stay visible, labelled as amended and amendment.
Do forms work offline?
No — filling and submitting a form needs a connection, and the app says so plainly rather than failing quietly. The rest of the field day is different: check-ins, time and materials, parts requests and notes all queue on the phone when there’s no signal and send themselves when coverage returns. Forms and photos are the two things that wait.
Every dollar goes straight into your account, not ours.
Where does the money actually go?
Into a merchant account in your own business name. Payments settle directly to your bank, your name is what appears on the customer’s statement, and refunds and disputes are handled in your own processor dashboard. ReadyServicePro adds no platform fee, takes no cut and holds nothing — we are not in the path the money travels.
What happens when the job grows halfway through?
The accepted estimate stays frozen and the extra work becomes a change order — a short plus-or-minus document the customer approves by typing their name, with nothing billable until they do. From then on the contract total is the estimate plus every approved change, and that is the figure the invoice bills from.
Do I bill the quote, or the hours my crew actually worked?
Whichever fits the job. Billing the contract charges the accepted estimate plus approved change orders — the natural close for quoted work. Billing the actuals charges what the crew really logged, at rate book prices — the natural close for time and materials. Either way the paid deposit credits against the balance automatically.
Does this replace QuickBooks?
No. ReadyServicePro runs the job and QuickBooks stays your books of record. Money events flow across as they happen — estimates, change orders, deposits, invoices, payments — and a client QuickBooks doesn’t have yet is matched or created the moment their first money event lands, never duplicated. Anything pulled the other way is a button you press.
When does an invoice count as paid?
When the money has genuinely settled. A card settles in seconds and the invoice flips to paid immediately. A bank transfer shows as processing until it clears, and nothing is marked paid before then. Payments taken by check or over the phone are marked paid by the office, so the paid stamp always means real money.
Your name on everything they see
Does my customer need an account or a password?
No. Their job page is a private link that arrives inside the message carrying your estimate or your invoice, and it opens straight to their own job on any device. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to reset — which is why customers actually use it instead of calling you for an update.
What does my customer see on their page?
The documents and the big moments: the estimate, their acceptance, the scheduled date with the crew named, we’re-on-the-way, the invoice, and paid. Nothing else appears unless you choose to share it — a photo or a comment is one checkbox away, and slips, drafts and internal notes never render at all.
Whose name is on all of this?
Yours. Your logo and your business name front every customer-facing surface — proposals, change orders, invoices, the job page and the payment pages — and your name is what carries through to the customer’s card statement. There is no ReadyServicePro branding on anything your customer sees, and no indication of what software produced it.
Do texts come from ReadyServicePro or from me?
From your own local business number, in your own words — and replies come back onto the job’s record where the office can answer them in context. Email replies arrive at your own business address. If you’d rather keep every customer conversation in the mail and messaging apps you already use, the same pre-written message hands off to those instead.
What if I change a setting after I’ve already sent something?
Nothing your customer already has changes. Documents freeze at the moment they send, so what somebody opens weeks later is exactly what you sent — the same scope, the same detail, the same branding — regardless of what has changed in your account since. New documents pick up the new settings.
Still wondering something?
Questions about what it costs — the tiers, what happens when the crew grows, the setup fee that doesn’t exist — are answered on the pricing page. Anything else, ask us — the chat on this page is the same one we build for you.