Guide
Field service software procurement: term, assurance and exit
Updated
Feature comparison is the easy part and it is where every buying process spends its time. These three questions are harder, later and more expensive to get wrong.
Talk to a specialist Nine field service platforms sold into UK operations, what each publishes on scheduling, contracts, subcontractors, price and assurance, and which three publish no price at all.
1. How long am I tied in?
Published terms in this market are sparse and long. Joblogic's pricing page states that most of its customers commit to 24 or 36 months, adding that a 12 month term can be structured if that suits the business better. Commusoft states that standard plans are built on a 12 month contract, with monthly rolling licences for seasonal workers and daily licences for subcontractors layered on top. Klipboard states subscriptions are 12 or 24 months, with a 15 per cent saving for paying annually. Everyone else publishes nothing. Ask for the term, the notice period and the price protection at renewal in the same sentence, because the third one is where a good deal quietly becomes an average one.
2. Will it pass my customer's security questionnaire?
If you hold public sector or large corporate contracts, someone will send you a supplier assurance questionnaire and your software will be in scope. Only two suppliers on our comparison publish certifications on the pages we read. Oneserve lists ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 27001 and ISO 45001, Cyber Essentials, availability on G-Cloud, AWS hosting, UK data residency and GDPR compliance. Joblogic states ISO 27001 certification, Cyber Essentials Plus and penetration testing on its pricing page. Protean states enhanced security and internal penetration testing on the hosted option and that Joblogic are Cyber Essentials Plus certified. That is not evidence the others lack certification: it is evidence they do not publish it, and you will have to ask.
Certification claims above are what each supplier publishes on the pages we read on 15 August 2026. Certificates lapse and scopes vary, so ask for the current certificate and check what is actually in its scope before you rely on it.
3. How do I get my data back out?
- Ask for a sample export of jobs, assets, forms and photos before you sign, not a promise of one.
- Establish who owns the data in the contract and what happens to it at termination and after.
- Check whether historic completed forms and certificates export as documents or as rows in a spreadsheet, because they are not the same thing when a customer asks for a record from four years ago.
- Confirm storage costs as they grow: Eworks Manager publishes £10 to £20 per additional 100GB a month, and Commusoft states storage scales with licence count. Exit is easier when you know what you are storing.
Two questions nobody asks and everybody should
- Who does the implementation, and are they the vendor?
- For Salesforce and Microsoft the answer is usually a partner, and the partner is most of the cost and nearly all of the risk. For the UK specialists it is usually the vendor's own team. Neither is wrong; they fail differently, and the failure mode you can live with is a legitimate selection criterion.
- What happens to the licence count when work is seasonal?
- This is where Commusoft's daily and rolling licences, Microsoft's Contractor licence at £38.40 and Salesforce's per-login contractor pricing at £17.60 are genuinely different products rather than different prices. If a quarter of your capacity appears in November and leaves in March, model the year rather than the month.