What CRM Should a Small Contractor Use

74% of contractors with fewer than 5 employees operate without any CRM system. They track leads on sticky notes, in text message threads, and in their heads. Jobs get lost. Follow-ups get forgotten. Revenue leaks out of the business in ways they never see because there’s no system tracking it.

If you’re a solo operator or running a small crew, you don’t need the same CRM that a 50-truck operation uses. Our CRM showdown for home service companies covers the enterprise-grade options. This guide is specifically for the 1-5 person shop where simplicity, mobile access, and a reasonable monthly bill matter more than feature lists.

What a small contractor actually needs from a CRM

Most CRM platforms market themselves with features you’ll never use. Automated multi-channel drip campaigns, territory mapping, fleet management, AI-powered lead scoring. That’s noise for a contractor running 3-8 jobs per week.

A small operation needs five things from a CRM:

Lead tracking. When someone calls, texts, or fills out a form, their information goes into one place. You can see every lead, when it came in, and whether anyone followed up. No more “I think I wrote that number on the back of an invoice somewhere.”

Scheduling and dispatching. A calendar view that shows your jobs for the day and week. Drag-and-drop scheduling if you have a helper or small crew. Integration with Google Calendar so everything stays synced.

Estimates and invoicing. Create a quote on your phone at the job site, send it to the customer, and convert it to an invoice when the work is done. The fewer apps involved in this process, the better.

Follow-up reminders. Automated reminders to follow up on open estimates, check in with past customers, and touch base on leads that went cold. Small contractors who adopt a CRM see an average 27% revenue increase within the first year, and most of that comes from following up on opportunities they would have previously forgotten.

Mobile-first design. You’re not sitting at a desk. You’re on a roof, under a sink, or driving between jobs. If the CRM doesn’t work flawlessly on your phone, you won’t use it. And a CRM you don’t use is worse than no CRM at all because you’re paying for nothing.

The CRM options ranked for small operations

Jobber: best overall for 1-5 person crews

Price: $49/month (Core) or $129/month (Connect)

Jobber was built for small field service businesses and it shows. The interface is clean, the mobile app is consistently rated the highest among contractor CRMs, and you can go from zero to operational in a single afternoon.

The Core plan at $49/month includes quoting, invoicing, scheduling, and a client hub where customers can approve quotes and pay online. That covers 90% of what a small contractor needs.

The Connect plan at $129/month adds automated follow-ups, review requests, and GPS tracking. Worth it once you have 2-3 employees in the field, but unnecessary if you’re solo.

On Reddit, Jobber consistently gets the highest recommendations from solo operators and small crews. One plumber described switching from paper invoices to Jobber and cutting his evening admin time from 2 hours to 20 minutes. His exact words: “I was spending my nights doing paperwork instead of being with my family. Jobber gave me my evenings back.”

Strengths: Fastest learning curve of any contractor CRM. The mobile app works offline for creating estimates in basements and attics with no signal. Batch invoicing saves hours at the end of the month.

Limitations: Marketing features are basic compared to dedicated marketing platforms. If you want advanced automated campaigns, you’ll need to pair it with another tool. Read our comparison of Jobber vs. GoHighLevel for that specific tradeoff.

Housecall Pro: best for customer communication

Price: $79/month (Basic) or $149/month (Essentials)

Housecall Pro is slightly more polished than Jobber on the customer-facing side. Automated appointment reminders, “on my way” texts to customers, and a clean booking page that you can link from your website and social media.

The Basic plan at $79/month covers scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, and review collection. The Essentials plan adds employee GPS tracking, reporting, and marketing features that help with automated follow-up.

A contractor on ContractorTalk reported that Housecall Pro’s automated “on my way” texts reduced his no-show rate from 12% to under 3%. The customer knows exactly when to expect the tech, which means fewer locked gates, fewer “I forgot you were coming” calls, and fewer wasted drive times.

Strengths: Best automated customer communication of any CRM at this price point. The “on my way” text feature alone reduces no-shows and improves your review scores. Integrates with QuickBooks for seamless accounting.

Limitations: The jump from $79 to $149 for employee management features feels steep for a 2-3 person operation. Some advanced reporting is locked behind higher tiers.

GoHighLevel: best for marketing-focused contractors

Price: $97/month (Starter)

GoHighLevel is a different animal. It’s a CRM, but it’s really a marketing automation platform that happens to have CRM features. If you want automated text follow-ups, email campaigns, a booking funnel, and review generation all in one place, GoHighLevel delivers more marketing muscle per dollar than anything else.

Several contractors on Reddit describe GoHighLevel as “the Swiss Army knife that takes a month to learn how to open.” One HVAC contractor spent 3 weekends setting it up but now runs automated follow-up sequences, review requests, and a booking funnel from a single platform. He estimated the tool replaced $400/month in separate subscriptions to Mailchimp, Podium, and a booking widget.

Strengths: Unlimited contacts, automated follow-up sequences, built-in reputation management, and landing page builder. For $97/month you get marketing tools that would cost $300+ if purchased separately. Connects with Zapier for additional automations.

Limitations: The learning curve is steep. Setup takes days, not hours. The interface isn’t as intuitive as Jobber or Housecall Pro for field operations. If you just need job scheduling and invoicing, GoHighLevel is overkill. If you want a marketing engine that also tracks jobs, it’s the best value.

ServiceTitan: usually too much for small contractors

Price: ~$200+/month (pricing varies, requires annual commitment)

ServiceTitan is the enterprise standard for home service companies, and our ServiceTitan review covers its capabilities in detail. For a solo operator or 2-3 person crew, it’s almost always the wrong choice.

The monthly cost is 2-4x higher than Jobber or Housecall Pro. The setup requires dedicated onboarding. The feature set is designed for companies with dispatchers, multiple crews, and dedicated office staff.

Jack Carr (Rapid HVAC, Nashville) uses ServiceTitan and discussed it on the Owned and Operated podcast. His take: ServiceTitan is powerful but requires dedicated office staff to manage effectively. For his growing operation with multiple trucks, the reporting and dispatch features justify the cost. For a 1-3 person crew, he’d recommend Jobber or Housecall Pro without hesitation.

If you have 5+ employees and plan to scale to 10-15 within a year, ServiceTitan may be worth evaluating. For a small crew that wants to stay small, it’s paying for a commercial kitchen when you need a microwave.

Spreadsheets and free tools: when they work

For a solo operator doing fewer than 5 jobs per week, a Google Sheet with columns for lead name, phone, service requested, status, and follow-up date can work. Pair it with Google Calendar for scheduling and Wave or Square for invoicing.

This approach costs $0/month and requires no learning curve. The downside is that nothing is automated. Every follow-up reminder has to be manually set. Every lead status has to be manually updated. At 5+ jobs per week, the manual overhead starts eating 8-10 hours per week that a CRM would eliminate.

CRM users save an average of 6.2 hours per week on administrative tasks. At a billable rate of $75-150/hour, that’s $465-930 per week in recaptured productivity. A $49-79/month CRM pays for itself multiple times over in time savings alone.

What to look for in a mobile app

The mobile app is the CRM for a small contractor. You’ll open it 20 times a day and the desktop version twice a month.

Test the mobile app before you commit. Every CRM offers a free trial. Spend that trial period using the mobile app exclusively. Create a quote on your phone. Schedule a job. Send an invoice. Mark a job as complete. If any of those actions take more than 3 taps, the app will slow you down in the field.

Offline access matters. You’ll be in crawl spaces, basements, and rural areas with no cell signal. Can you still pull up a customer’s address and job notes? Can you create an estimate offline and have it sync when you’re back in range? Jobber handles this well. Some other platforms don’t.

Photo attachment from the field. Before/after photos, damage documentation, and progress shots should be attachable directly from the CRM’s mobile app to the customer’s job record. If you have to take photos in your camera app and manually upload them later, you won’t do it consistently.

CRM adoption rates tell the story

CRM adoption among contractors breaks down by company size:

• 1 employee (solo): 18% use a CRM
• 2-5 employees: 34% use a CRM
• 6-15 employees: 61% use a CRM
• 16-50 employees: 83% use a CRM
• 50+ employees: 94% use a CRM

The pattern is clear. As companies grow, CRM adoption becomes nearly universal because it’s impossible to manage a growing operation without one. The contractors who adopt a CRM before they “need” one grow faster because they’re not losing leads and revenue to disorganization.

Tommy Mello of A1 Garage Door Service, a $200M+ revenue operation, credits his growth partly to obsessive CRM usage. He tracks every metric from booking rate to average ticket to technician upsell rate, and targets 70%+ booking rates across all CSRs. His philosophy: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” CSRs who can’t maintain those booking rate targets get retrained or moved. That kind of measurement only works when your CRM is capturing every interaction.

Sera Systems (a field service platform) reports that contractors who use their CRM’s membership management features see 40% higher maintenance agreement sign-up rates. The automation handles what techs forget — following up with customers who said “let me think about it” during the service call.

Adopting a CRM when you’re small means you’re building systems that scale. When you hire your first helper, they can see the schedule. When you bring on a second crew, they can access job details. When you’re running 20+ jobs per week, nothing falls through the cracks because the system was already in place.

Setting up your CRM in one day

You don’t need a week-long implementation. For a small operation, a CRM should be functional within 4-6 hours.

Hour 1-2: Create your account, set up your service types, and configure your service area. Import your existing customer list from your phone contacts or spreadsheet.

Hour 2-3: Set up your estimate and invoice templates. Add your logo, payment terms, license number, and standard service descriptions. Create 3-5 estimate templates for your most common jobs.

Hour 3-4: Configure automated reminders. Set up appointment confirmation texts, follow-up reminders for open estimates, and review request triggers after completed jobs.

Hour 4-6: Run your first day of real jobs through the system. Create estimates on site, schedule the work, complete the jobs, and send invoices. Troubleshoot anything that feels clunky.

By the end of one business day, you should have a working CRM with your customer data, templates, and automations in place. Every day after that, the system saves you more time than you spent setting it up.

The real cost of no CRM

The monthly subscription is visible. The cost of operating without a CRM is invisible, which is why 74% of small contractors don’t feel the pain until they add up the losses.

A contractor on r/sweatystartup tracked every lead he received for 90 days before and after implementing a CRM. Before: he followed up on roughly 60% of leads, with an average response time of 6 hours. After: 95% follow-up rate, average response time under 15 minutes. His booked jobs increased 34% with no increase in marketing spend.

Forgotten follow-ups. The average contractor loses 2-3 jobs per month to missed follow-ups on estimates and lead inquiries. At an average job value of $1,800, that’s $3,600-5,400 per month in lost revenue.

Double-booked or missed appointments. Without a scheduling system, conflicts happen. Showing up to the wrong address or double-booking a time slot costs you the job and damages your reputation.

Slow invoicing. Contractors without a CRM take an average of 11 days to send an invoice after completing a job. Contractors with a CRM send invoices the same day. Faster invoicing means faster payment and better cash flow.

No customer history. When a past customer calls, can you instantly see every job you’ve done for them, what you charged, and any notes from previous visits? A CRM gives you that context. A stack of paper invoices doesn’t.

Making your decision

If you’re a solo operator doing fewer than 5 jobs per week and watching every dollar, start with a Google Sheet system and upgrade to Jobber ($49/month) when the manual overhead becomes painful.

If you’re running 5-15 jobs per week with 1-3 employees, Jobber at $49/month or Housecall Pro at $79/month are your best options. Both are mobile-first, easy to learn, and designed for exactly your situation.

If your primary challenge is marketing and lead follow-up rather than job scheduling, GoHighLevel at $97/month gives you the most marketing automation per dollar.

If you’re scaling past 5 employees and need enterprise-grade reporting, ServiceTitan and similar platforms become relevant. But that’s a future problem for a future version of your business.

The best CRM for a small contractor is the one you’ll actually use every day. A $49/month app that you open 20 times a day beats a $200/month platform that you log into twice a month. Pick the simplest tool that covers your core needs, commit to using it for 30 days, and let the time savings and recovered revenue speak for themselves.