As a plumbing tech or commercial plumbing business operator, you can handle a range of tasks within a week, from late-night residential emergencies to multi-week commercial pipe installations.
By choosing the right apps to use, you’ll reduce administrative time, streamline operational standards, and better support your plumbing techs in the field, for better client satisfaction.
This guide covers 19 useful plumbing apps that can help across your field service organization, with each app solving a specific problem, such as code requirements, invoicing, etc., to support any growing team. Let’s dive in.
The Top 19 Apps for Plumbing Businesses
Operations and Core Apps
1. ServiceBox
ServiceBox is a powerful plumbing field service management software for residential and commercial plumbing contractors. It helps to centralize your scheduling and dispatching, quoting, invoicing, inventory, and recurring maintenance so office and field staff can easily stay fully aligned, no matter the job or information needed, while saving time.
You can easily allow your technicians to clock in, pull up service history, generate work orders, attach photos and notes to the work order, and collect payment on site. The drag-and-drop dispatch features take the heavy lifting out of route optimizations and help support your team with auto-generated work orders to reduce hours of admin time every week.
2. QuickBooks
QuickBooks handles the standard accounting work a plumbing business needs: invoicing, expense tracking, payroll, sales tax, and end-of-year reporting. The mobile app is where you, as an owner or tech, can do day-to-day work like sending an invoice from the truck, snapping a parts receipt from the supply house, or checking what’s outstanding before following up for payments. The best part is that QuickBooks integrates with major field service software, like ServiceBox, to save your accounting team hours every week.
3. Sage
Sage works well as an accounting platform for commercial plumbing contractors that want something a bit more robust than what QuickBooks can offer. Their tools, like job costing, can support long pipe installs or help to track progress for billing on a new construction project. Along with tracking equipment depreciation, handling project-level P&L, multi-entity reporting, and detailed labor and materials tracking. Really, anything your commercial plumbing business would need on the account side.
If you’re looking to supercharge your accounting platforms, you can easily integrate Sage with ServiceBox, which will sync work orders, timesheets, and invoices between each platform automatically, saving your payroll and administrative team several hours each week.
4. Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free calendar app that can sync across all your devices to keep track of your upcoming backflow tests, preventative maintenance stops, or in-office team meetings. Its basic functionality and ease of use make it perfect for those smaller plumbing businesses that want simple day tracking. However, once you’re up to 3 to 4 techs, it’s best to look for a more robust field service management software.
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5. WhatsApp
WhatsApp Business is especially useful for handling basic residential plumbing communications with customers, particularly in rural areas where regular cellular service may be spotty. If you’re looking to provide a simple way to relay WhatsApp ETA messages, photos of a new hot water tank install, or short videos showing clients how to shut off their water main, WhatsApp makes it easy, and it's a free app, too.
6. Slack
In-office and field tech communication is essential for any serious plumbing business, which is where Slack comes in. It’s an app that helps to streamline communications and avoid those long email threads and annoying group chats by providing a user interface for direct messaging and channel or categorized group chats. Notifications can also be customized to avoid on-the-job interruptions or to receive important job work order information back from the head office. If you’re growing, building better communication channels across your entire business is essential.
Calculation & Measurement Apps
7. Pipe Trades Pro
Pipe Trades Pro is loved by pipefitters, sprinkler fitters, and commercial plumbers because it takes on the heavy lifting for handling calculations specific to complex angles, rolling offsets, parallel pipe layouts, cut and material lengths, and flow rates. If you’re looking to create efficiencies through better material usage and large jobs, this app is essential, as it’ll help avoid miscalculations that can cost thousands over the course of a several-month plumbing refit in a multi-story building.
8. Plumbing Formulator
Save the day-to-day math for adding up your plumbing business's profits. The Plumbing Formulator app is useful for your field techs to support their residential and light commercial calculations like pipe volume, gallons per fixture, flow rates, BTU requirements, and more. The app provides access to more than 120 formulas that residential service techs and apprentices can easily use without pulling out a pen and paper or a clipboard.
9. EasyMeasure
If your field techs are scoping for a residential bathroom refit, helping to upgrade piping in a basement, or need some basic footage calculations for a quote, the EasyMeasure app uses your phone’s camera and accelerometer to estimate the distance to an object. The app claims it's accurate to within a foot, so it’s best used for rough-scoping, rather than precision and on-the-job plumbing work.
10. AR Plan 3D
AR Plan 3D is an advanced augmented reality app for scanning a room for an accurate 3D floor plan. This comes in extremely handy for any residential or commercial estimator. Let’s say you’re a commercial estimator working on a bid for plumbing improvements and modernizations. You can get a marked-up plan without manually measuring every corner and surface.
11. Bubble Level
If your I-Beam level is too large for a small drainage slope check or to ensure a flat horizontal extension fitting, the Bubble Level app can help save the day. It uses your phone's accelerometer to check the level. It’s best used as a backup for residential jobs that don’t require extreme precision. However, for some commercial jobs where every degree matters, this may not be the best tool to incorporate.
12. Flashlight
Sometimes, reaching around to your tool belt to grab your flashlight isn’t feasible when you may have a smartphone in your front pocket, more easily accessible. That’s where the Flashlight app comes in. Whether you’re under a tight crawl space looking for a leak or up in the corner of an office’s utility room, using an adjustable flashlight app that can change color and brightness will come in handy more often than you’ll anticipate.
Reference & Code Apps
13. Code Snap (UPC & IPC)
Code Snap puts the Uniform Plumbing Code (UPC) and International Plumbing Code (IPC) on a phone or tablet with full-text search. Local jurisdictions adopt one or the other, and inspectors enforce specific sections word-for-word, such as venting distances, trap arm lengths, fixture unit counts, and backflow requirements.
14. Copper Tube Handbook
The Copper Tube Handbook app is designed to provide industry-standard referencing for copper piping, which can include things like pressure ratings by tube type and size (Type K, L, M), friction loss tables, allowable working temperatures, and other important plumbing specifications that your technicians need, especially in the commercial field.
15. Plumber’s Handbook
The Plumber’s Handbook app provides various guides for water supply systems, drainage and venting, fitting types, common installation techniques, and basic troubleshooting. This app is perfect for junior residential technicians who may not be familiar with older galvanized pipes, outdated PEX configurations, and lead piping in heritage homes.
16. Reddit (r/Plumbing)
While the r/Plumbing or r/askplumbing communities on Reddit aren’t technically apps, the Reddit app and related communities can provide a wealth of information for both office staff and field techs. It’s a place where techs come to share complex or unfamiliar valves, unique piping configurations, or corroded fittings they can’t identify. This app is best used as supplementary insights if other employees and technicians cannot provide the necessary insights.
Operations & Office Apps
17. Plumbing Sales Coach
The Plumbing Sales Coach app is there to help you develop better client service skills, which will ultimately help you increase profits through revenue-generating ideas and other tools to run a leaner operation.
Many of your strongest plumbing techs may prefer to stay in their lane and provide excellent trades work, and may struggle on the sales side with upsells. This app helps to shorten the learning curve without the hand-holding of a sales professional watching your every step. This is typically better suited for competitive residential plumbing markets.
18. Dropbox
If you’re looking to centralize important documents, like commercial work orders, employee handbooks, re-piping agreements, or even MSDS sheets, having cloud storage like Dropbox provides a secure point for all field techs and office staff to access those documents.
19. Google Photos
If your plumbing techs are taking lots of photos on the job, Google Photos helps to provide a secure place where photos are automatically backed up. That way, any hardware or system failures on the job don’t interfere with progress to date and photo documentation. It’s best used as a place to store photos for each tech's personal reference or professional use in documenting things like PEX piping problems.
Get All-In-One Plumbing Field Service Management Software
While there are many useful apps to help your technicians with on-the-job calculations and code lookups, you can centralize most operational apps with ServiceBox, an all-in-one field service management software that’s built specifically with residential and commercial plumbing companies in mind.
You can simplify complex workflows by combining quoting, scheduling, dispatching, preventative maintenance tracking, and more into a single software platform. Ultimately, allowing you to centralize your core business processes to better service your clients, save hours internally, and better scale your plumbing company.
Final Thoughts
Say goodbye to the hours of manual entry in spreadsheets and cross-checking paper time sheets at the end of every day or work week. It’s time to use the right plumbing apps, so you can offload manual tasks, so each hour is spent on the right work, like building a great workforce culture, drumming up more business, or furthering support for your field techs.
And when you combine these specialized tools with a management platform like ServiceBox, your business is set up to run more efficiently than ever. Ready to explore how ServiceBox can support your commercial or residential plumbing business? Book your demo today.
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