You finished the job. Nobody knows if it made money

Field service & trades software is the set of desktop tools that runs the paperwork side of a trades business, from the quote a homeowner sees to the payroll and safety records a crew leaves behind. SortField is how SortSuite groups those tools for electricians, plumbers, HVAC shops, general contractors, and home-services crews. Instead of buying one heavy platform, you pick the piece that fits the job in front of you. A one-truck operator and a shop with twenty techs work off the same local-first parts, and your files stay on your own machine rather than in a vendor’s cloud.

The work these tools handle is the ordinary grind of running trucks. You measure a job and price it. You dispatch a tech and log the hours. You track mileage on every service call. You collect insurance certificates from subcontractors before they set foot on a site. Good field service & trades software takes each of those steps off a whiteboard or a shared spreadsheet and puts it where the next person can find it. See the whole lineup on the field service and trades page.

Take quoting as an example. The Estimate & Quote AI tool turns a photo or a voice note from the site into a priced quote against your own pricebook, so a tech does not sit in the truck typing line items by hand. Takeoffs work the same way. You upload plan PDFs and the software measures and counts quantities, then drops them into a priced estimate a small shop can actually afford. That is measuring and pricing work that once required a full construction suite, brought down to a scale a two-person operation can carry. Each tool assumes you already know your trade and only needs to keep the paperwork moving as fast as you do.

The recordkeeping side matters just as much, because a trades business is a payroll employer and often a safety-regulated one. The Department of Labor requires you to keep payroll records for years, not weeks, as its Fact Sheet 21 on FLSA recordkeeping spells out. Field service & trades software should make those hours and wages easy to preserve rather than something you reconstruct at audit time.

What ties the SortField tools together is that they assume real field conditions. Signal drops in a basement or a rural crawlspace. Subs forget to send their certificate of insurance. Material prices move between the quote and the invoice. Each tool is built to keep working through those gaps instead of pretending they do not happen. You are not paying for a sales demo. You are paying for the boring parts of the day to get recorded correctly, so that the money, the labor, and the paper all line up when someone asks. That is the whole point of the SortField group, and it is why the pricing is aimed at trades shops rather than enterprise buyers. A four-truck plumbing outfit and a solo electrician face the same underlying paperwork, only at different volumes, and field service & trades software that respects that fact lets each of them start small and add the next tool only when a real bottleneck shows up. You are never forced to adopt the whole system at once.

Running trucks means you are an employer, and that pulls in three separate recordkeeping duties that many trades owners track in their heads until an audit or a claim forces the issue. Field service & trades software exists to catch those records at the moment they are created, when a tech clocks in, drives to a call, or reports an injury, so nothing has to be rebuilt later from memory.

Start with hours and wages. The Wage and Hour Division tells employers to preserve payroll data for years, and its Fact Sheet 21 on FLSA recordkeeping lists the pay records you keep for three years and the wage-computation records you keep for two. When crew timesheets flow straight into job costing, those numbers already sit in one place instead of on paper stubs in a glovebox. That is the retention duty handled as a byproduct of normal work.

Mileage is the second piece. Every service call adds business miles, and the IRS sets a standard rate each year that you can claim only if you have a real log behind it. The rate and the rules live on the IRS page for standard mileage rates, which put business use at 70 cents per mile for 2025. Field service & trades software that captures drive distance per job turns that deduction into a defensible record rather than a year-end guess.

Third is safety. Many trades employers must log work-related injuries and illnesses, and OSHA is specific about the forms. Its recordkeeping requirements require covered employers to record incidents on the OSHA 300, 300A, and 301 forms. A field incident logger that captures the date, the injury, and the site photo the moment it happens is how a small shop keeps that log honest instead of scrambling in February.

The Contractor Compliance Cockpit sits next to all of this on the paperwork you owe other parties. It chases subcontractors for missing certificates of insurance and expiring licenses on its own, so you are not the one sending reminder emails the night before a dispatch. That is a different rule set from payroll or OSHA, but it fails the same way when nobody owns the follow-up. A lapsed certificate on a sub is the kind of gap that only surfaces after something goes wrong on a site, which is exactly when you want it already handled.

None of this makes the tool your compliance lawyer. It does not file anything for you or interpret a citation. What field service & trades software does is make the underlying record exist and stay findable, which is the part small shops usually get wrong. The record is the thing an auditor, an insurer, or a lawyer asks for, and a record that exists in the software the day it was created beats one you piece together from paper stubs months later. Field service & trades software will not argue your case, but it can hand you clean evidence when you need it. You can read how the SortField tools fit together on the field service and trades overview, then decide which duty is hurting you most and start there.

Short answer. On your own machine. The SortField tools are local-first, so the customer names, phone numbers, addresses, photos, and payment details you handle stay on the computer or the device where the work happens, not on a copy sitting in a vendor’s cloud. For a trades business that holds a lot of personal information about homeowners, that default matters more than it first sounds.

The FTC has written plainly about what a small business owes the people whose data it holds. Its guide on protecting personal information lays out five plain steps, take stock, scale down, lock it, pitch it, and plan ahead. Field service & trades software that keeps data local makes several of those steps easier by default, because you cannot lose in a cloud breach what never left your building. You still control who on the crew can open what, and you still decide when old records get cleared out.

Consider a real day. A tech pulls up to a house with no signal in the crawlspace. With the Offline Field Service App, they create the job and take payment on the spot, fully offline, and the record queues on the device until a connection comes back and it syncs to QuickBooks Online. The homeowner’s card details are handled on site, not bounced through a third-party server that may or may not still hold them. Field service & trades software built this way shrinks the surface where data can leak. The fewer places a homeowner’s address and card sit, the fewer places anyone can take them from, and the FTC guidance is clear that scaling down what you hold is a real security control, not just tidiness.

Local-first does not mean careless. These tools keep a record of what they did, so if you ever have to show how a customer file was handled, there is an audit trail to point at. That matters for the scale-down and pitch-it steps the FTC describes, because you can see what you are holding and clear what you no longer need. It also means a laptop that walks off a truck is a device problem you can plan for, not an automatic public disclosure.

The honest caveat is that local-first puts backup on you. If the machine dies and you never made a copy, the data is gone, and no cloud is quietly holding a spare. That is a fair trade for a shop that would rather own its own files than rent access to them, but it is a trade you should make on purpose. Field service & trades software gives you the private-by-default position. Pairing it with a real backup routine is what makes that position safe. Export a copy to an external drive on a schedule you control, and you get the privacy of local storage without betting the business on a single hard drive. That is the plan-ahead step the FTC names, applied to a trades shop that would rather not learn the lesson the expensive way.

You can see how every SortField tool handles data on the field service and trades page before you commit to any one of them.

The big field service platforms, ServiceTitan, Jobber, and Housecall Pro, are built to be the one system a shop runs everything through, priced and structured for that role. SortField takes the opposite shape. It is a group of focused desktop tools you add where a specific step hurts, without ripping out whatever dispatching or invoicing you already use. That difference shows up in three places, price, ownership, and the field-condition gaps the big suites leave open.

Price is the obvious one. The mid-market suites charge per seat and climb fast as a crew grows, which is exactly the squeeze a shop with ten to thirty techs feels. The Vertical Ops OS tool answers that with one flat monthly fee up to thirty users, so adding a tech does not re-price the whole account. Field service & trades software should not punish you for hiring. A shop that grows from twelve techs to twenty pays the same flat fee, which turns headcount from a cost multiplier back into a plain business decision.

Ownership is the second. The subscription suites keep your data on their servers, and if you stop paying, your access to your own history goes with it. SortField tools are local-first and some are sold as a one-time desktop purchase, so the files stay yours. That also changes your recordkeeping posture, because the retention periods the IRS describes for business records in its guidance on how long to keep records are easier to honor when the records live on hardware you control rather than in an account that can be shut off.

The third difference is the gaps. The big tools assume a live connection and a live subscription, and they break at the edges of real field work. A tech in a dead zone cannot wait for Jobber to load. The Offline Field Service App fills that exact hole by working fully offline and syncing later. A small shop priced out of PlanSwift or Procore still needs takeoffs, so the takeoff tool measures plan PDFs at a price that shop can pay. Field service & trades software from SortField is meant to sit beside the incumbent, not fight it for control of the whole business.

The blunt version. If you want a single vendor to own your dispatch, marketing, and books and you can carry the monthly cost, a full suite may suit you. If you want to keep your own files, pay a flat or one-time price, and fix the two or three steps that actually slow your day, that is what SortField is for. Field service & trades software does not have to be all-or-nothing. Most shops land somewhere in between, keeping the dispatching they know and bolting on the two tools that fix their worst days. There is no migration project, no data export from the old vendor, and no month of the crew learning a whole new system while the trucks still have to roll.

Compare the pieces side by side on the field service and trades overview and start with whichever gap is costing you the most right now.

Yes, and those are two of the most concrete reasons a trades shop reaches for field service & trades software in the first place. Quoting and compliance chasing are both slow, both easy to put off, and both cost real money when they slip. SortField splits them into tools that each do one of those jobs well.

On quoting, the Estimate & Quote AI tool takes a photo or a voice note from the site and drafts a priced quote against your own pricebook, pulling local material costs so the number reflects what the job really costs today. A tech does not build line items by hand in the truck. For plan work, the Construction Takeoff Lite tool reads your plan PDFs, measures and counts quantities on each page, and turns the takeoff into a priced estimate. That is measuring work a small shop used to pay a full construction suite to do.

On compliance chasing, the Contractor Compliance Cockpit does more than remind you. It auto-chases subcontractors for missing certificates of insurance and expiring licenses, and it gives you a status view you check before you dispatch anyone to a site. That is the difference between a calendar alert and the paperwork actually arriving. Field service & trades software earns its keep when it removes the follow-up from your plate, not just when it pings you.

These capabilities also feed the records you are required to keep. A priced quote that becomes a job creates hours, materials, and income that the IRS expects you to be able to support, and it sets the retention clock running on that paperwork. The IRS lays out how long different business records must be kept in its guidance on how long to keep records, which runs from three years for most items out to longer windows in specific cases. Tools that capture the job and the payment cleanly the first time make honoring those windows far less painful, because the supporting document is already attached to the job rather than lost in a truck. Field service & trades software that records the quote-to-invoice trail is quietly building the file you would otherwise scramble to assemble.

What none of these tools do is invent data. The quote is only as good as your pricebook, and the compliance view only tracks the documents you tell it to require. Field service & trades software speeds up the work you already understand, and it keeps a record of what it did, but it does not decide your prices or your insurance requirements for you. You set the rules once and let the tool run them. The judgment stays with you, and the repetitive follow-up moves to the software, which is the trade most owners actually want out of the day.

If quoting speed and sub-chasing are your two worst time sinks, those are the tools to try first. See how they fit with the rest of the SortField group on the field service and trades page, and pick the one that clears the bigger backlog.