Simpro Premium, start to finish

A written companion to the course. The course teaches the workflow in order; this is the part you re-read the night before an interview.

1 · The mental model

Before any menu, understand the spine. Everything hangs off it:

Customer → Site → Quote or Job → Schedule → Job card → Invoice → Payment

Two things follow, and both trip up beginners:

• A job always belongs to a customer and a site. You cannot create a floating job. If the customer doesn't exist yet, you create them first — which is why "enrol the customer" is genuinely step one, not admin overhead.
• A quote is a different object from a job. An accepted quote is converted into a job. Create the job directly and you've skipped the quote, so there's nothing to compare actual costs against later.

The reason a business pays for Simpro rather than a shared calendar is the last part: it tracks estimated, committed and actual cost on every job, so the owner can see which work made money.

2 · Terminology

Australian vs US

Vocabulary worth knowing before an interview

• Cost centre — separates operational costs for reporting. A job can have several. Plumbing, gas fitting and drainage might each be one.
• Zone — a designated area or territory, used for scheduling and reporting. Think suburbs or service regions.
• Team — employees, contractors and/or plant items scheduled as a single unit.
• Plant item — equipment (excavator, jetter, van) scheduled like a person.
• Pre-build — a saved bundle of parts and labour dropped into a quote or job in one click. "Replace 50L electric HWS" pulls in the unit, fittings and standard labour hours.
• Script — pre-written text inserted into a description or notes field instead of retyping.
• Response time — the time between logging and scheduling a job. Set per customer, then selected on a job to signal urgency. This is the field that carries emergency priority.

3 · The main pages

Learn where things live before learning what the buttons do.

Navigating within a record

Card files, jobs, quotes and setup pages are organised in tabs, some breaking into sub-tabs. The tab you're on has a grey background, others white. The active sub-tab is black and bold; the others blue. You can open multiple jobs or invoices at once.

Save buttons matter: Save keeps changes and stays. Save and Finish commits and exits. Next advances to the following tab without leaving.

4 · The setup layer

You probably won't own this as a coordinator, but knowing it exists is what separates a user from someone who understands the system.

Security groups control who can view and change what. This is where approval authority lives — who can approve quotes, job cards, invoices and purchase orders. When a help article says "you need the appropriate permissions", this is why.

Status codes and automatic triggers. Leads, quotes, jobs, invoices and purchase orders each carry a status code reflecting their position in the workflow. Simpro has predefined trigger points — emailing a quote, for instance — and passing one automatically changes the status code and its colour. This is why lists and boards are colour-coded, and why status is mostly maintained by doing the work rather than updating a field.

Archive reasons. If configured, archiving a lead, quote or job prompts you to select why. That dropdown is the reporting hook for lost-quote analysis.

Also here: cost centres, zones, teams, schedule rates, labour rates, custom fields, scripts, activities, forms setup.

5 · Enrolling people

Create a customer

Path: Customers > Create New verify path

1. Choose customer type — company or individual.
2. Enter Company Name. You cannot duplicate an existing name. If it's blocked, an archived customer probably exists and needs reactivating rather than duplicating.
3. Enter address, billing details, and payment terms.
4. Set a response time if this customer has an agreed SLA.
5. Add contacts — each flagged as the contact for Quote, Job, Invoice, or Statement & Overdue Letter, and one as Primary.
6. Add sites. A customer can have many. A real estate agency might have forty. The site is where work physically happens.
7. Use the Custom sub-tab for custom fields, which then become searchable.
8. Optionally attach a membership to auto-apply discounts.

Create an employee

Path: People / Employees > Create New verify path

1. Enter personal and contact details.
2. Assign licences — the critical part:
   • User licence — lets them log into Simpro Premium itself.
   • Mobility licence — lets them use Simpro Mobile in the field.
   • A technician can only be selected as an Assigned Technician if they hold both.
3. Set available hours. Project View scheduling won't work correctly without these.
4. Assign cost centres, zones and teams — these drive who appears as an option when you schedule.
5. Assign labour rates and associated schedule rates, which is how actual labour cost lands on jobs.
6. Set their security group.
7. Record licences, tickets and certifications. may be a custom field

The Logs tab on any card file shows every action and change performed on that record — schedule, job, quote, order, stock and invoice modifications, note creation. This is the audit trail. Know it exists.

Contractors

Contractors are card files too, but they get work orders rather than schedules, and their costs flow in via contractor invoices. In Simpro, contractor work orders are estimated costs until the contractor invoice arrives.

6 · Creating a quote

Path: Quotes > Create New > Service Quote verify path

1. Search and select the customer. If they have overdue invoices, a warning appears telling you whether they're 30 or 90 days overdue, with a link to view and email their statement. Do not ignore this.
2. Select Customer Contact and Site Contact, or create new ones.
3. Enter the quote Description. This flows to the quote card, Simpro Mobile, and the resulting job if it converts. Or use Insert Script.
4. Set the due date via Next > Quote Settings.
5. Go to Parts & Labour > Billable and build it: catalogue parts, pre-builds for standard work, One Off Items for non-catalogue costs (parking, government charges, custom fabrication), and labour at the appropriate rate.
6. Review markup and margin.
7. Save, then email. Emailing typically trips a status trigger.

When accepted, convert the quote to a job. Pricing, line items, customer details and attachments carry across — that carry-through is the whole point, and it's what a software demo should be tested on.

Going the other way: to create a quote from a job that wasn't originally quoted, copy the job, then in the copy go to the Optional tab and set Stage to Quote.

7 · Creating a job

Creating a service job

1. Search and select the customer. Same overdue-invoice warning applies.
2. Select the site, then Customer Contact and Site Contact. The site contact may be a building or store manager rather than the customer — these numbers become available to the technician in Simpro Mobile.
3. Enter Order Number and Job Name if required.
4. Enter the job Description. This appears on the job card, in Simpro Mobile, and on the customer invoice.
5. Select the cost centre. You can rename it for this job.
6. Set the Due Date, and select a response time if urgency matters.
7. Schedule a technician, or leave it and schedule later. Alternatively assign a technician plus a due date without a time block — the job appears in their Service module and they fit it in.
8. Add tags for reporting. Adjust rates on the Optional tab if needed.
9. Save and Finish.

Creating a recurring job

Path: Recurring > Create New Recurring Job. Select the customer or customer contract, build the template, set the recurrence pattern, review the summary, Save and Finish. Jobs generated from the template are invoiced like any other — you cannot invoice the template itself.

8 · Scheduling and dispatch

Schedules are colour-coded by status, with a legend at the bottom. There's also a map view via Simtrac in Day, Week, Month and Project views — assign available employees using the map as a visual, then update schedules or print a run sheet.

In Day View, each technician has a grey box beside their name. The clock icon shows available hours for a standard day; the spanner icon shows how many jobs they're scheduled to. That's your at-a-glance capacity read.

Tools that filter who is available: available hours, cost centres, zones, teams, preferred technicians, and travel distance. Zones can be overridden when you need to send someone out of area.

Three practical notes

• Day View by default only displays resources scheduled or created within thirty days either side of today. Select Show All to see everyone.
• Set browser zoom to 100% before scheduling. Simpro documents scheduling errors at other zoom levels.
• If timesheets are locked for a date range, you cannot create or edit schedules in that range.

Technicians with a Mobility licence receive a notification in Simpro Mobile when a job or activity is created or updated. That is your dispatch notification.

Activities

An activity is non-job time — training, vehicle servicing, leave, toolbox meetings. Created in System > Setup > Activities, then scheduled exactly like a job. Important for a coordinator: a technician who looks free may have an activity blocking them.

9 · Simpro Mobile

The technician works in the Service module. What they can do:

• See scheduled and assigned jobs; search pending or in-progress jobs.
• Record travel time and time on site; pause work to stop the clock.
• See who else is scheduled to the site; access site and asset history.
• Add Work Completed and Technician Notes. Work Completed notes save as a script and can be pulled straight into the invoice description.
• Edit time blocks per cost centre via Time Recorded.
• View and add materials — catalogue items including those inside pre-builds.
• Complete pre- and post-audits for safety.
• Change status, which triggers workflow processes for office staff.
• Invoice and take payment in the field, including card payments where available.
• Work offline and sync later.

A technician can also create a job from the app: add icon > New Job. All jobs created in the Service module are Service jobs. At the end of the last job of the day, a Travel Back prompt appears.

10 · Invoicing and payment

The documented workflow: create the customer invoice → post it to your accounting package → apply payment.

Invoice types on project work: deposit claim, progress claim, final claim, retention claim.

Contractor invoices flow separately — work orders marked complete and fully invoiced move to the Invoiced/Archived table under Jobs > Contractor Jobs.

11 · Dashboards and reporting

The Dashboard is the landing page, built from widgets. widget set varies by build

The concept that actually matters, and the one to raise in an interview:

A coordinator who checks actual against quoted before invoicing is doing the thing the software was bought for.

Also reportable: response times (you can provide response time reports to customers), archive reasons for lost quotes, and the Logs tab audit trail on any record.

12 · Flowcharts to know

The process flows worth being able to sketch on a whiteboard:

1. Enquiry → customer check → quote-or-job fork → job created
2. Job queue → licence and skill match → availability → dispatch → job card → invoice → close
3. Dispatch under normal vs emergency conditions, including conflict resolution when the only qualified technician is already assigned
4. Quote lifecycle — create → email (status trigger) → accepted → convert to job → archive with reason if lost
5. Invoice lifecycle — create → post to accounting → payment applied → void and audit if wrong
6. Contractor work order — raise → contractor updates in portal → contractor invoice received → processed, with or without retention withheld

13 · A learning path

If you have a week:

• Day 1 — vocabulary and navigation. Sections 2 and 3. Learn where things live and what the words mean. Don't touch a button.
• Day 2 — the customer layer. Create customers, sites, contacts. Understand why duplicates are the enemy.
• Day 3 — quotes and jobs. Create both. Convert a quote to a job. Notice what carries across.
• Day 4 — scheduling. Live in Day View. Schedule, reschedule, deliberately create a conflict and resolve it.
• Day 5 — the field and the money. Job cards, work completed notes, invoicing, the audit-and-void rule.
• Day 6 — reporting. Estimated vs committed vs actual. Find the profit on a job.
• Day 7 — rehearse. Explain the whole spine out loud in under three minutes.

Free resources inside Simpro itself

• Help > Walk Me Through — built-in step-by-step guidance. Search "Employees", "Service Job", "Recurring Job" and it walks you through the actual screens. Better than any video, because it's live.
• Simpro Learning Toolbox — interactive training material referenced throughout the help guide.
• helpguide.simprogroup.com — the full documentation, free and public.

14 · Honest gaps

Written from Simpro's public documentation, not from hands-on use of a live build. What that means:

• Exact menu paths marked verify should be checked in a real system.
• Dashboard widget specifics vary by build, edition and security group.
• Licence and ticket tracking for tradespeople may use custom fields rather than a native field — worth asking the employer directly, and asking it is a good signal.
• Multi-company builds change some behaviour: employees can be shared between companies, with a default company set per employee.
• Project jobs, contractor management, the leads pipeline and the full report library are named here but not taught in depth.

If you can get a trial or a screen-share, spend the time on Schedules > Day View and on converting a quote to a job. Those two screens are where a coordinator's day actually happens.