Switch from ServiceM8 to HelloGrowthCRM

ServiceM8 is job management software built for small trade businesses in Australia and New Zealand. Job cards, a dispatch map, on-site quoting, photos, checklists, invoicing and a solid link into Xero and MYOB. It is priced by jobs per month rather than by staff, which is unusual and often generous: the free plan covers thirty jobs a month for one user, then Starter at $29, Growing at $79, Premium at $149 and Premium Plus at $349, all in AUD including GST, with unlimited staff on the paid plans. For a plumbing or electrical business turning over a steady book of jobs, that model works well and the accounting side genuinely saves time at BAS.

There is one gap that a lot of tradies feel and it sits before the job card exists. ServiceM8 is organised around jobs. An enquiry that has not become a job yet does not have much of a home. The phone call that rang out while you were under a house, the website form that came in on Saturday, the quote you sent nine days ago that has gone quiet: none of those have a stage, an owner or a next action. Most operators handle it with a notebook and a good memory, which works until the enquiry volume goes up. HelloGrowthCRM covers exactly that stretch, from first contact through to an accepted quote, and stops there.

The Android situation is worth stating plainly because it costs real money. ServiceM8's full application runs on iPhone and iPad only. Android users get ServiceM8 Lite, a reduced companion app. Plenty of AU and NZ businesses have ended up buying iPhones for staff who already own a Samsung or a Pixel, purely to run the software. HelloGrowthCRM ships full native apps on both iOS and Android with the same features on each, so an apprentice on Android gets the same tool as the boss on an iPhone. That will not fix your job management, but for the sales and quoting side it removes a hardware bill you should not have to pay.

What HelloGrowthCRM adds at $12 per user per month, or $10 on annual, is the sales layer. Leads and pipeline stages so every enquiry has an owner. A dialer in the browser and both mobile apps, with call recording and an AI call summary written onto the contact record. AI lead scoring so you ring the enquiries most likely to book first. Email sequences, SMS and WhatsApp that chase quotes on a timetable you set once, instead of ten cents a text sent by hand when you remember. Web forms feeding the pipeline directly. A quote builder and invoicing in the same place. Reporting dashboards that answer how many enquiries turned into quotes and how many quotes turned into jobs.

Be clear on what it will not do, because that decides the answer for most tradies. HelloGrowthCRM has no dispatch board, no scheduling calendar, no staff location tracking, no timesheets, no materials inventory and no job costing, and it does not sync to Xero or MYOB. ServiceM8 does all of that. If you send staff to addresses every morning and your invoices flow through to your accounting package for GST and BAS, keep ServiceM8 and put HelloGrowthCRM in front of it. Migration is a CSV job from the Reports tab in the ServiceM8 online dashboard, using Client List Export and Job List Export. Setup is about fifteen minutes, and the free forever plan means you can run a fortnight of real enquiries through it before deciding anything.