Jobber vs ScapesHQ for Drainage Contractors

A drainage lead lands at 7:40 on a Tuesday evening. Nobody calls it back until Thursday. Meanwhile a $6,400 basin-and-pipe job you finished nine days ago is still unbilled, because the notes for it are on a folded estimate in the truck door.

Both of those are software problems. They are not the same software problem, and most of the tool comparisons contractors read blur them together.

This post is written in September 2026. Feature sets and pricing tiers move, on both sides. Treat everything here as a starting point and check the current vendor pages before you put a card in.

Two leaks, and they have different shapes

Jobber grew out of the back half of a job. Crew assignment, a calendar you can drag things around on, a mobile app the guys use, an invoice at the end, a card payment, a sync to your accounting software. That lineage shows in everything about how it's laid out.

ScapesHQ grew out of the front half. A lead hits your phone, a human touches it fast, the property and the customer get recorded as separate things that stay linked, an estimate turns into a proposal with options, and the homeowner signs it without printing anything.

If your actual pain is that crews show up at the wrong address, invoices go out three weeks late, and you're chasing payment by text, this comparison should end with you buying a field service platform. That's a legitimate outcome and I'd rather say so than dance around it.

If your pain is that you're paying for leads that go two days without a call, and your quotes are Word documents that get emailed as PDFs and then vanish, scheduling software will not fix that. You'll have a beautiful calendar with nothing new on it.

Work out which end is leaking before you shop

Don't buy off a feature list. Buy off two calculations you can do tonight with last quarter's records. Substitute your own numbers everywhere — the ones below are an example so the arithmetic is visible.

The front-end number

Pull last month's leads. Count how many got a real human contact the same day, and how many didn't.

• 30 leads in the month.
• 19 reached the same day. 11 got a call two days later, or never.
• Your close rate on same-day contacts: 1 in 4. That's 4.75 jobs.
• Assume the cold 11 close at half that rate — 12.5 percent. That's 1.4 jobs.
• Average signed job $6,400, gross margin 35 percent.

1.4 jobs × $6,400 = $8,960 in revenue, or about $3,100 of gross margin, sitting in the pile you didn't answer fast enough. Per month. If your own cold-lead close rate is better than half — and in some markets it is, because drainage buyers shop slowly — the number shrinks. Work it with your rates, not mine. The mechanics of why the gap is that wide are in the post on speed to lead.

The back-end number

Pull last quarter's completed jobs. For each one, write down the date the crew finished and the date the money landed.

• 15 jobs in the quarter, $6,400 average. $96,000 billed over roughly 91 days, so about $1,050 of revenue per day.
• Average completion-to-cash: 24 days.
• A tighter billing process — invoice the day of completion, card payment on the link — gets that to 10 days.
• 14 days × $1,050 ≈ $14,700 of working capital freed up.

Be honest with yourself about what that $14,700 is. It's a one-time shift in cash position, not recurring margin. It's worth real money if you're floating material on a credit card at 22 percent, and it's worth very little if you're sitting on cash.

The part of the back end that is recurring margin is unbilled work. Count the jobs last year where an extra half-day, a second cleanout or an added run of pipe never made it onto an invoice. If that's one job in eight at $300 to $600 a pop, on 60 jobs a year, you're somewhere in the $2,000 to $4,500 range annually. That range varies more by how disciplined your foreman is than by what software you own.

Now compare. Roughly $3,100 a month of lost margin at the front against a one-time $14,700 of cash timing plus a few thousand a year of unbilled extras at the back. On those example numbers the front end is the bigger fire. On your numbers it might not be.

Where each tool's design points, as of September 2026

The table below describes what each product is shaped around, not an exhaustive feature audit. Jobber's capabilities are stated broadly on purpose — they ship changes and repackage plans, and a specific claim written today ages badly. Verify on their site before you decide anything on it.

The row that matters most for drainage work is the last one. A lot of field service software assumes one customer equals one address. Drainage doesn't always work that way — a property manager with nine buildings, a builder with four lots in the same subdivision, a homeowner who moves and calls you about the new house. If you're regularly tripping over that, it's a structural mismatch, and no amount of workaround saves you. There's more on when that threshold actually bites in the piece on where a spreadsheet breaks.

What is not built here, said plainly

ScapesHQ does not invoice. It does not take payments. There is no time tracking, no job actuals, no costing against budget, no dispatch board, no route optimisation, no SMS to customers, no pricing rules and no automated follow-up playbooks. None of that is hiding behind an upgrade tier. It isn't there.

So if you come in expecting the signed proposal to turn itself into an invoice, it won't. What you get is a signed proposal with the scope, the options the customer chose, the signature evidence and the timeline of everything that was sent. You then bill it somewhere else — accounting software, a field service platform, or whatever you use now.

For job costing specifically, you don't need either product to start. Four numbers tracked by hand across three jobs will tell you more about where your bids are wrong than a dashboard will, and the manual method is written out here. Do that first. Buy costing software once you know which number you're chasing.

Running both is fine, if you name the system of record

Plenty of contractors will end up running a lead-and-proposal tool at the front and a field service platform at the back. That's a reasonable shape for a business doing 60 to 150 jobs a year with two crews. It's also the shape that quietly creates a second filing cabinet if you're careless.

Three rules keep it from turning into double entry:

1. One system owns the customer record until signature. Everything before the signed proposal — the lead, the site visit notes, the estimate versions, the follow-ups — lives in one place. Nothing gets copied into the scheduling tool until there's a signature.
2. The other system owns everything after signature. Schedule, crew hours, materials, invoice, payment. Once the job is sold, the front-end record stops changing except for the signed document itself.
3. Copy across once, on purpose. Name, address, phone, scope, price, signed date. Five minutes per sold job. On 10 sold jobs a month that's under an hour — cheaper than any integration you'd have to maintain, and you'll notice errors while you're typing.

Where this goes wrong is when both systems hold an editable version of the price. Pick one. The signed document is the price. If it changes, it changes by a written change order, not by somebody adjusting a line in the scheduling tool on a Friday afternoon.

The other thing worth checking before you commit to either: how you get your data back out. Ask for an export, in a format you can open, covering customers, jobs and documents. If the answer is vague, that's information about the next five years, not just this month.

The afternoon version of this decision

Sit down with last quarter's job list and answer these in order. Stop when one of them is obviously yes.

• Did you lose a job in the last 90 days because a crew went to the wrong place, or two crews got double-booked? Buy scheduling.
• Is your completion-to-cash average over three weeks, and is that costing you interest or supplier terms? Buy invoicing and payments.
• Are you paying for leads — Meta, Google, anywhere — and can't say what happened to each one? Fix intake and response.
• Do quotes leave as PDFs and disappear, with no record of whether they were opened? Fix proposals.
• Do you have customers with more than one property, and does that break your current system every time? Fix your record structure.

Most contractors who read that list find two yeses, one at each end. If you can only afford one this year, buy the one attached to the bigger number from the arithmetic above. The front-end leak is usually lost margin. The back-end leak is usually timing. Lost margin doesn't come back.

And for the wider category question — what the different types of software actually do, and which ones overlap — the honest comparison across the whole category covers ground this post deliberately skipped.

FAQ

Can I run Jobber and ScapesHQ at the same time?

Yes, and a fair number of contractors will land there. Keep everything before the signature in one system and everything after it in the other, then copy the sold job across by hand — it's about five minutes per job. The failure mode is letting both systems hold an editable price.

Does ScapesHQ do invoicing or take payments?

No. There is no invoicing, no card processing and no payment tracking, and none of it is behind a higher plan. You sign the proposal here and bill it in your accounting software or field service platform.

Which one is cheaper?

That depends on seat count and which tier you land on, and both vendors change pricing. Compare on total seats you'd actually pay for, not headline rates, and check the current pricing pages rather than any number written in a blog post.

Does Jobber capture Meta lead ads directly?

Check their current integration list before you assume either way — this changes. Many contractors route Meta leads through email notifications or a connector tool, which works but adds a delay and gives you no visibility when the connection quietly breaks. If you're spending real money on lead ads, ask specifically what happens when a lead fails to arrive.

I'm a one-truck operation. Do I need either?

Probably not yet, if you're under roughly 10 leads a month and quoting from the tailgate. The thresholds that force the decision are lead volume you can't personally answer, a second crew you have to coordinate, and customers with multiple properties. Track your numbers by hand until one of those shows up.

The short version

Jobber is shaped around the back half of a job — scheduling, invoicing, payments, crew hours. ScapesHQ is shaped around the front half — lead intake, response, estimates and signed proposals — and does not invoice or take payments at all. Do the two calculations in this post on last quarter's numbers: lost margin from unanswered leads at the front, and cash tied up in slow billing at the back. Buy the one attached to the bigger number, and if you run both, decide which system owns the record before and after signature.

Book a walkthrough and we'll go through your last thirty leads and your last fifteen jobs to see which end is actually costing you more.