HVAC contractor software for the busy half of the year

An HVAC shop does not have a busy season. It has two, with a spring and a fall in between that decide whether the business is profitable or merely large. In July the constraint is technicians; in November it is cash; in March it is the paperwork nobody had time for in either.

Install and service are priced by different logic

A changeout is a project: equipment, line set, ductwork modifications, permit, crane on a commercial roof, two days of labor. A no-cool call is forty minutes and a capacitor. One is estimated, the other is priced from a book — and a shop that prices both from memory loses money on exactly one of them and never knows which.

In Zirko your price book is a folder tree you build yourself. Material carries a part number, a unit, short and long text, cost, markup and sell price in the same row. A service is an assembly of cost types: labor minutes valued through a wage group, material, equipment, subcontracting. Zirko computes in both directions — sell price from cost and markup, or the markup back out of a price you set — and a price typed once into a document goes back into the price book with one click. That is how a callout that has now happened eleven times stops being priced from memory on the twelfth.

Supplier catalogs are imported from Excel or CSV with column mapping and a check step before anything is taken over. There is no live link to a distributor and no price comparison between them.

The technician sees the job. Not the margin.

On the phone a job's line items come from a reading view that carries no amounts at all, and that is decided in the database rather than in the interface: the technician sees assigned jobs and released folders, and nothing about markup.

Report templates are built from blocks — date, period, staff, a number field, free text, photo and a signature taken with a finger. Static pressure, superheat and delta T go in the number fields, the nameplate goes in as a photo, and fields you mark as required stop a report from being closed half-written. While the application is open, hours and messages can still be written in a crawlspace with no signal.

The same replacement is taxed three ways in three states

Whether the equipment is taxable, whether the labor is taxable, and whether a lump-sum contract changes both — the answer is a state answer, and it is not intuitive. The same job is taxed three different ways in three states works it through, and Texas alone splits residential labor from commercial: residential labor is not taxed, commercial labor is.

Zirko suggests no rate for any of it. A US business enters its own rates, each with up to four components for State, County and City, and can issue an invoice with no tax line at all — a distinct state, not zero percent. Whether you may do the work at all is a state question too: contractor licensing is a state question, not a national one.

What it does not do

There is no service agreement engine. Zirko does not generate next year's maintenance visits, does not hold a per-unit equipment history with serial numbers and warranty dates, and does not dispatch. The planning board says who is on which job from one week to half a year, with time off and holidays already on it, and it reports a double booking — but it does not optimize a route, forecast capacity or show a map.

There is also no language model anywhere in the product. The automation is eleven fixed rules you switch on individually, each with a deadline and a text you wrote, every run logged with its trigger, its recipient and its moment.

Plans count office seats plus field licenses, never jobs per month. Fourteen days free, no payment details.