GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Garage Door Software

Garage Door Software: The Complete Guide for Garage Door Companies

Most garage door companies start the same way. One owner, one van, a phone that rings at all hours, and a stack of carbon-copy tickets on the passenger seat. It works until it does not. The second van shows up, the tune-up customers from last fall start calling to ask when you are coming back, and nobody can remember which opener is in the house on Maple Street. That is the moment owners start looking at garage door software.

This guide covers what that software is, what it should do for a garage door shop in particular, and how to get from paper to a working system without losing a week of calls.

What Garage Door Software Is

This guide is the starting point for the GarageDoorBossPro garage door software section, where each piece below gets its own article.

Garage door software is the system the whole company runs on. It holds your customers and their addresses, the doors and hardware at each house, the estimates you send, the calls on today's schedule, what your techs see on their phones, the texts that go to customers and the invoices that come back paid. Instead of a whiteboard, a paper ticket book, a spreadsheet of tune-up customers and a separate card reader, everything lives in one place and every person in the company sees the same version of it.

The difference between generic field-service software and garage door software is the house record. A generic system knows an address and a notes box. A garage door company needs to know the door size, the material, the opener, the springs, which bay is which and how the tech gets in.

The Feature Tour

Here is what GarageDoorBossPro does, piece by piece.

• Equipment saved on the house. Every property keeps a list of its garage doors, openers, torsion springs, extension springs, cables & drums, keypads, remotes, safety sensors, commercial rolling or sectional doors and gate openers. Each item can carry a brand, model #, serial #, year installed, size (like 16x7 or 9x7, or an opener's HP), drive or material, bay and access notes.
• The From House picker. When you create a new job at a house, the equipment fills in from the house record. When the tech changes something on the job, like a new opener, the change flows back to the house.
• Door safety inspection. The tech app has a checklist covering springs, cables & drums, rollers, hinges & brackets, tracks, door balance, the auto-reverse safety test, photo-eye sensors, opener force & limits, lubrication, bottom seal & weatherstripping, the emergency release, and keypads & remotes. It also takes readings, a condition (Good, Needs attention or Repair recommended) and written recommendations.
• A printed inspection report. The office sees the inspection on the job and can print a Garage Door Safety Inspection report for the homeowner.
• The Waiting List. Recurring work is set by minimum days between visits, such as 365 for a yearly tune-up or 90 for commercial door maintenance. When a visit comes due it lands on a live map and list, colored not due yet, due now, or overdue past a 7-day grace, along with new service requests.
• Dispatch. The Scheduled List shows jobs by day, filtered by van, with auto-routing Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, set route order, saved views and printed route sheets.
• The tech app. Techs sign in with a company login and a personal PIN and see the day's calls in route order with navigation, equipment and access notes, past notes, the inspection checklist, Start / Skip / Complete, before and after photos and a time clock.
• The customer app. Customers see where they are on today's route, request service, sign up for a tune-up plan, update their card, see invoices, pay, rate and refer.
• Estimates. Built from your own service list, approved online, and turned into the scheduled job.
• Billing. Invoices with line items and sales tax, card on file, auto-charge on completion or on a schedule, and past-due follow-up.
• Monthly accounts. A property manager, HOA or commercial account set to Monthly gets one statement covering every address.
• Texting. Two-way texting from the office plus automatic reminders, on-the-way and arrived alerts.

Each of these gets a closer look later in this series, starting with Doors, Openers and Springs Saved on the House: The Equipment Record in Garage Door Software.

One Van or a Few Vans

A one-van company needs the software to stay out of the way. The owner is the tech, the dispatcher and the bookkeeper, so the value is in not writing things twice: the equipment is already on the house, the tune-up comes due on its own, and the card gets charged when the job is marked complete.

Once there are two or three vans, the dispatch board starts doing real work. A common setup is one van kept loose for repairs and emergency spring calls and one on installs and tune-ups. The office drags calls between vans, auto-routes each van's day from the shop, and the techs' phones follow along. Crew GPS on the office map shows which van is closest when a new broken-spring call comes in.

Repair, Install, Residential and Commercial

Garage door work splits two ways, and good software handles both splits without a second system.

Repair vs install. Repair calls are short, urgent and often same-day: a broken torsion spring, a frayed cable, an off-track door, an opener that hums and does nothing. Install jobs are booked ahead, often start as an estimate, and can take most of a day. The software keeps both on the same board. Repairs come in from phone calls and the customer app, installs come in from approved estimates, and both carry the equipment from the house.

Residential vs commercial. A homeowner has one or two doors and pays by card. A property manager or HOA may have dozens of addresses, a commercial customer may have rolling doors on a loading dock, and both usually want one bill a month. One client can hold many addresses, recurring maintenance can be set to any number of days, and monthly account billing puts every address on a single statement.

Setup, CSV Import and the First Week

Getting started does not need to take long. A practical order:

1. Add your services: service call, torsion spring replacement, extension springs, cables, rollers, off-track repair, opener repair and install, new door install, panel replacement, sensors, keypads and remotes, weatherstripping, commercial door repair, after-hours emergency, and a yearly tune-up plan.
2. Add your vans and techs, each tech with a personal PIN.
3. Bring in your customer list with a CSV import. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically.
4. Add equipment to houses as you visit them. You do not need every door recorded on day one.
5. Run tomorrow's calls from the dispatch board and put the tech app on one phone first.

The first week is mostly about habits: every new call goes into the software, every completed job gets tapped Complete, and every tune-up customer gets a plan so they come due on the Waiting List next year.

Safety Belongs With the Pros

One note for any garage door company putting software in front of customers. Springs and cables carry serious tension and are a job for trained techs, not homeowners. The software is built around that: the customer app lets homeowners request service and see what was found, and the inspection report lists recommendations for your techs to carry out. Nothing in it walks a homeowner through a repair.

Choosing Garage Door Software

When you compare systems, check a few things before price:

• Can you save doors, openers and springs on the house, with size, model and bay, and does that show on the tech's phone?
• Is there a door safety inspection with a printable report?
• Do yearly tune-ups come due on their own?
• Can a property manager get one monthly statement for every address?
• Does the tech app run on the phones your techs already carry?

GarageDoorBossPro plans are Start at $59/month, Pro at $89/month and Crew at $199/month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card. There is also a live demo of a fully-stocked sample garage door company at my.garagedoorbosspro.com/demo.html that you can click through without signing up. For the full feature list, head back to the GarageDoorBossPro garage door software page.