Plumbing software for Australian plumbing businesses
Plumbing runs on interruption. A burst flexi hose at 6am reorders the whole day and the bathroom you had booked in Brunswick moves to Thursday. Opsler is plumbing software built for that day rather than the tidy one in the demo: drag the burst into the run, the plumber sees it on their phone without a call, and the job it displaced is still on the board instead of in someone’s head.
One record carries the call-out from the phone ringing to the money landing — customer, property, quote, schedule slot, site photos, invoice. Nothing gets retyped, nothing gets lost between the ute and the office. Two seats are free permanently, and the third costs US$25 a month, not a new plan.
- 2 seats
- free, no expiry
- 50 jobs
- a month on free
- US$25
- per seat, per month
- 14 days
- Pro trial, no card
What plumbing software should manage
Strip the marketing away and a plumbing business needs five things held in one place: who the customer is, which property the work happened at, what was quoted, what was actually done, and whether you have been paid. Get those five joined up and the admin stops being a second job. Everything else is a convenience on top.
The category answers to a lot of names. Buyers and vendors call it plumbing management software, plumbing job management software, plumbing invoice software, job management software for plumbers, or just plumbers software — and plenty of people type plumber software and mean the identical thing. The sprawl exists because every vendor entered from whichever of those five needs they started with. An invoicing tool grew a diary. A diary grew invoicing. You feel the seam in the handoffs: the invoicing-first tools cannot tell you what happened on site, and the diary-first ones make you retype the quote.
Opsler is built around the job as the unit, so the customer, the property, the quote, the schedule slot, the site record and the invoice all hang off one thing. Every vendor claims that, so judge it on the messy cases instead: an emergency with no quote, a diagnostic that turns into a second job, an agent who pays for a tenant’s property. Those are worked through below, with the actual behaviour rather than a feature name.
What sits outside the boundary, so you can size it in one line: design and estimating tools, payroll and rostering, and your accounting package. Opsler feeds the last of those rather than replacing it. If you want the same lifecycle without the plumbing framing, the job management software page covers it across every trade.
Organise customers, properties and plumbing job history
In plumbing the job history is not filing, it is diagnostic information — and it is worth money. A customer record holds contact details, a service address, an optional separate billing address, notes, and every visit ever made to that property.
Take a recurring blockage at a house in Bentleigh. Third call in fourteen months. The history shows the first visit cleared roots at the boundary trap and the second jetted the line and recommended a camera inspection the owner declined. You walk in having a completely different conversation — and you quote the repair the property actually needs instead of clearing it a third time for a fraction of the value.
The separate billing address earns its keep in rental work, which is most people’s bread and butter. The tenant reports the fault, the property manager approves it, the owner pays. Opsler bills the billing address while the job files against the service address, so the history follows the property rather than whoever happened to be paying that year. Agents change; the boundary trap does not.
Where the record stops
History is assembled from the jobs at that address rather than from a separate asset register, so there is no standing record for a hot water unit with its own make, model, serial, install date and warranty expiry tracked independently. Those details live in the job notes and the photos. For domestic and small commercial plumbing that is the right amount of structure. Managing plant across a large portfolio is asset-register territory, and worth asking about specifically.
Capture call-outs, maintenance work and project scope
Plumbing work arrives in five shapes and each one needs different handling. Software that understands only one forces the rest through the wrong process — which is how an emergency ends up waiting on a quote nobody sent, or a maintenance round gets re-entered by hand every quarter. Here is what each shape does in Opsler.
| Work type | Shape | How Opsler handles it |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency call-out | Unbooked, same day, priced on attendance | Raised straight as a job, no quote step. Lands in the unscheduled queue sorted by priority so it does not sit behind next week's bathroom. |
| Diagnostic visit | Short, becomes something else | Completed as its own job, then a quote is raised against the same property for the repair. Both stay in that address's history. |
| Quoted repair or replacement | Quote, wait, book, do | Quote approved by the customer converts into the job with its line items. Nothing is retyped between quote and invoice. |
| Scheduled maintenance | Repeating, known interval | A recurring series generates jobs 30 days ahead on the interval you set. Pro plan. |
| Project or fit-out | Multi-day, staged | Booked as jobs against the property, which suits a two-week bathroom or a small fit-out. Staged progress claims and critical paths are construction PM territory. |
The first four are where the money is for most Australian plumbing businesses, and they run end to end without a workaround. The fifth is scoped deliberately: jobs against a property handle a bathroom or a small fit-out comfortably, while staged progress claims, retention and contract-sum variations belong to construction project management, which is a different purchase entirely.
Prepare plumbing quotes with clear inclusions
Most plumbing disputes are scope disputes, not price disputes. The customer thought the price covered making good; you thought it covered the pipework. A quote that lists inclusions line by line is the cheapest insurance a plumbing business can buy, and it is in the base plan rather than behind a proposals upgrade.
Quotes build from a price book you maintain, against a customer and a property, each line carrying its own quantity, rate and tax treatment. A hot water replacement quoted at $2,450 shows the unit, the tempering valve, the drain relocation, disposal of the old unit and the labour as separate lines — so when the customer asks why it is not $1,800, the answer is already on the page and you are not defending a number over the phone.
They approve it from an emailed link with a one-time code, then sign on screen, typed or drawn. No account to create, no app to install, no printing. The approval and its timestamp are recorded against the quote, and accepting it converts the quote into the job carrying those exact line items through to the invoice.
Two things to plan around. Your price book is yours to maintain — when copper moves you update it, because there is no supplier catalogue or live pricing feed sitting behind it. And chasing an unaccepted quote is a job for a person: Opsler shows you which ones are outstanding rather than emailing them for you. Revisions, variations and the full quote state model live on the quoting software page.
Schedule and update plumbing jobs
Plumbing scheduling software is judged on how it handles the day falling apart, not on how it looks when the week is empty. This one is built for the 6am phone call.
The dispatch board shows a day or a week with each plumber in their own lane and an unscheduled queue beside them sorted by priority. When the burst comes in you can see who is closest to free, move the afternoon job, and the person on the tools has the change on their phone before you have put the handset down. Reassignment records who had it before, which is what you want when you are reconstructing a day a fortnight later.
Double-booking gets caught rather than allowed: assign someone to two overlapping jobs and the conflict check raises an error naming the job it collides with, so you find out while you can still fix it. Each plumber shows as available, busy or offline with their booked slots and the day’s job count, and busy sets itself while a job timer runs.
Repeat work runs as a recurring series on the interval you choose, generating jobs 30 days ahead on the Pro plan — contracted work turning itself into scheduled work. Be clear about what that is: a generated schedule, not a clairvoyant one. It follows the interval you set rather than picking the best day, matching by skill or reshuffling the run when someone is held up. Customers hear about a change by email and their job link; text is on the roadmap as a bring-your-own-provider option. Diary depth belongs to the job scheduling software page.
Keep the field job record usable on mobile
What a plumber can see and change on site is the test that decides whether any of this gets used. Under a house on one bar, an interface built for a desk is worth nothing, and the crew go back to the notepad by the second week.
Opsler installs from the browser onto a phone and behaves like an app afterwards — own icon, own window, no app store, no download step for a new apprentice on their first morning. Opening a job shows the address, the access notes, the scope and the property’s history. The plumber moves it through assigned, in progress and completed, and the office watches each change without ringing to ask.
Completion requires evidence: at least one before photo, one after photo and a signature. In plumbing that requirement pays for itself the first time somebody claims the wall was already stained. Notes taken on site stay on the job. Time is recorded as work and pause intervals with a reason attached — parts run to the merchant, break, waiting on the customer — which on hourly work is the difference between an invoice you can stand behind and an argument you lose. Timers come with Pro.
With no signal at all, the on-site half keeps going: complete the job with photos and signature, tick the checklist, add notes, change status and finish the invoice. It all syncs on reconnect. The diary and the dispatch board need a connection, which in practice is the office’s problem rather than the plumber’s. Device-by-device behaviour is on the tradie app page.
Create invoices with ABN, GST and accounting boundaries
A completed job produces the invoice from what was actually done, carrying your ABN, your business details and the GST treatment you configured. It moves through draft, approval where your business wants it, sent, and paid — so outstanding money is on a screen instead of in your memory on a Sunday night.
GST is set up as a named rate you apply to labour, to parts, or to both, which matters when your treatment differs between the two, and the breakdown prints on the invoice. What stays with you and your accountant: lodging the BAS, remitting GST, validating an ABN against the register, and confirming the invoice meets Australian Taxation Office tax-invoice requirements. The ATO publishes what a valid tax invoice must contain; produce one real invoice on the free plan and check it against that list, or have your accountant look once and then stop thinking about it.
Payment is recorded rather than processed, and that is worth doing the arithmetic on. Opsler marks invoices paid, tracks what is outstanding and records the method — cash, cheque, bank transfer and the rest. No money passes through it and it charges no platform fee, so nobody takes a slice of a $2,450 hot water replacement on the way past. On real plumbing ticket sizes that is usually larger than the software bill.
Your customers can still pay online. Attach your own payment link — your Stripe or Square page, or whatever you already use — to an invoice, a job or a recurring series, and the customer sees it when they open their job link. They pay you directly, through your processor, at your rates, and Opsler records that it happened.
Bookkeeping is a file rather than a connection: QuickBooks-formatted and Xero-formatted CSV exports you download and import yourself on the Pro plan, on your schedule, with nothing to authorise and nothing to re-link when a password changes. A few minutes in a monthly bookkeeping run.
Plumbing and gas certificates, licences and specialist tools
Compliance is where plumbing software marketing gets vaguest, so here is a straight answer you can hold any vendor to.
Plumbing certification in Australia is regulated state by state. Victoria works through the Victorian Building Authority, Queensland through the Queensland Building and Construction Commission, New South Wales through Fair Trading, and the other states and territories through their own bodies. Each has its own compliance certificate, its own lodgement route and its own rules about which classes of work require one. Gas fitting sits on top of that with a separate licence class and separate obligations again.
Opsler issues none of these — no compliance certificate generated or lodged, no licence or gas fitting authorisation verified, no SWMS, JSAs or risk assessments. That is deliberate rather than a gap waiting to be filled: a form that looks official but is not the current instrument in your state is worse than no form at all, and we are not shipping one to win a feature comparison. Specialist tools stay specialist too — hydraulic design, pipe sizing, CAD, takeoff from drawings and supplier pricebooks are separate purchases for the businesses that need them.
What you get instead is the operational record that sits beside compliance and is what actually gets asked for when a job is queried a year later: attendance, timing, work performed, before and after photos, the customer’s signature, site notes and the invoice, all against the property. Certificates belong to your regulator. The job record belongs here, and most disputes are settled by the second one.
Plumbing software evaluation checklist
Test with your own work, on a real week, including a day that goes wrong. Every vendor’s demo handles a tidy Tuesday. Eight steps, and the first five cost you nothing.
- Take an emergency call-out with no quote and push it to a paid invoice. Count the screens. This is your highest-frequency workflow and it should be the shortest.
- Book a full day, then break it: insert an urgent job at 9am and move two others. Time the reshuffle, and check whether the field found out without a phone call.
- Set up a rental with the tenant’s address as the service address and the agent as the billing address. Invoice it. Check where it went.
- Run a diagnostic visit that becomes a quoted repair. Confirm both jobs stay attached to the same property history.
- Go under a house or into a basement — somewhere genuinely without signal — and complete a job with photos and a signature. Come back up and confirm it synced.
- Export a month of invoices and import them into your accounting package yourself. The claim is a formatted file; make the file prove it.
- Ask every vendor on your list which state’s compliance certificate they produce. Note whether you get a jurisdiction or a shrug.
- Price it properly: at US$25 per seat per month with no minimum, four plumbers and an office manager is five seats. No band to grow into, no tier above it, billed in US dollars.
Run next week through it before you pay anything
Steps one to five run on the free Budding plan — 2 seats, 50 jobs a month, unlimited customers, 100 inventory items in 1 location, 21 core features, and no clock on it. Step six needs the accounting export, which comes with Pro, and the 14-day trial covers it without a card. After that it is US$25 a seat with no minimum, and your fourth plumber costs the same as your second.
Common questions
Not Opsler, and no software should tell you otherwise — this is the most over-claimed thing in the category. Plumbing and gas certification in Australia sits with state and territory regulators — the Victorian Building Authority, the Queensland Building and Construction Commission, NSW Fair Trading and their counterparts — and the certificate is a legal instrument tied to a licensed person, issued through that regulator's own process. Gas fitting adds its own licence class and its own paperwork on top. A generic template that resembles the current form is a liability, not a shortcut. What you get here is the evidence that sits beside the certificate and is what actually gets asked for when a job is queried: who attended, when, what was done, before and after photos, the customer's signature, site notes and the invoice.
The scheduling half, yes, and it is the half most businesses lose money on. Set a recurring series at a fixed interval — annually, say — against a customer, and Opsler generates those jobs 30 days ahead so the work lands on the board before it falls due rather than after a reminder letter. That comes with the Pro plan. The device register is a different thing: there is no standing record for a particular backflow prevention device with its serial number, position on site, last test date and result, tracked independently of the jobs done on it. Those details live in job notes and photos. If you test hundreds of devices and report by device rather than by customer, an asset register is what you are shopping for, and it is worth putting that question first when you shortlist.
The on-site half keeps working, which is the half that happens where the signal is worst. A plumber can open the job, complete it with before and after photos and a signature, tick through checklist items, add notes, change the job status, and finish the invoice — all with no connection at all. Everything syncs the moment the phone finds signal again. The office half needs a connection: reloading the diary, reorganising the dispatch board, or pulling up a customer who was never loaded onto that device. For plumbing that split lands in exactly the right place, because the blackspots are under floors, in plant rooms and in basements, which is precisely where the job gets done.
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