You can't hire your way out of the labor shortage. Run more calls with the trucks you have while the back office runs itself.
ProEdge Ops is field service software for contractors who are tired of being the back office. We don't hand you another dashboard to manage. The platform runs dispatch, scheduling, invoicing, and collections on its own, and every job it touches makes the next one go better. We're building it now with a small group of founding contractors. The rest of the trade catches up later.
The problem
There is no hiring plan that closes that gap. Every experienced tech who retires takes twenty years of judgment out the door, and the pipeline behind him is half the size it was a decade ago. For a 1 to 15 truck shop, the shortage shows up as three things: wages you can barely carry, calls you turn away, and hours your best people burn on everything except turning wrenches.
So the question isn't how to find more techs. It's how to get more out of the trucks you already run. There are exactly two levers, and ProEdge Ops was built to pull both.
The full numbers, sourced: The HVAC technician shortage in 2026 →
Lever one
The legacy model
Every FSM platform on the market hands you a dashboard and walks away. Someone on your team becomes the dispatcher, the scheduler, the biller, the collections department. Full-time jobs created by the tool that was supposed to save you time. In a labor market this tight, that's the most expensive seat in the building.
The ProEdge model
ProEdge runs dispatch, scheduling, invoicing, and collections in the background, the way a back office would, without the back office. Hours that used to go into operating software go back into revenue. That's the difference between software you operate and software that operates for you.
Lever two
Automation gives you the hours back. Intelligence makes the hours worth more. Every job closed on ProEdge feeds the next one: the next dispatch gets smarter, the next diagnosis starts further ahead, the next truck rolls with the right parts already on it.
What that looks like on the schedule: fewer callbacks eating truck slots. More jobs finished on the first visit instead of the second. Less windshield time between the supply house and the job. And techs who get better every month, because what your best tech figured out on Tuesday is working for the whole shop by Wednesday.
A callback and a parts run don't feel like a labor problem. They are. Every one of them is a truck slot you can't sell and can't hire your way back.
Every workflow, screen, and decision point was designed around what actually happens on a job, not what a product manager imagined from a conference room. That matters for a second reason now: in a market where good techs pick their shop, the tools are part of the offer. ProEdge is built to be the platform techs ask for by name, which makes it part of how you recruit them and part of why they stay.
Want to see the numbers?
The license fee is what you pay. The labor to operate the platform is what you don't see. The True Cost Calculator shows both, in 60 seconds, with no email required.