Plumbing Software — Data Model | FieldCamp

How a plumbing business runs in FieldCamp: core records for service calls and installs, plus installed fixtures as assets, maintenance plans, and permits.

FieldCamp runs a plumbing business on one connected set of records that works on day one and bends to how your shop actually operates.

A homeowner or builder calls with a leak, a clog, or a tank that quit, you quote the work, you schedule and dispatch a crew, you bill, and you get paid.

That whole chain is modeled directly as Request → Estimate → Job → Visit(s) → Invoice → Payment, and most residential service runs on it alone.

Where plumbing gets specific — the water heaters, softeners, and fixtures you install and come back to, the maintenance plans that bring customers back, and the permits a city demands on bigger installs — FieldCamp adds a small, tightly-scoped layer on top.

What the core already gives you

Before anything plumbing-specific, the standard records cover most of the business — and all of everyday break-and-fix service.

Customers holds homeowners, property managers, builders, and general contractors. The customer type marks individual or business, and three separate addresses let a bill go to a GC while the work happens at the site.
Requests capture the inbound service call or quote request, with inspection-scheduled and quote stages already built in.
Jobs are the work order — one-off for a same-day drain clear, multi-day for a repipe, or recurring for a maintenance plan.
Visits handle dispatch, en-route, on-site, photo capture, and the finish-work signature gate.
Estimates & Invoices carry the quote — including a Good / Better / Best comparison for "repair vs. replace the water heater" — plus deposits, purchase-order numbers, and net terms for commercial billing.
The Price Book holds fixtures, water heaters, valves, fittings, and hourly labor, with vendor pricing and taxable flags.
Team Members carry license class as a skill, and service areas carry territory — no custom object needed.

On-site checklists, leak-search write-ups, and field photos use job forms, which are built for structured on-site capture, signature, and photos.

Most service calls — a clog, a leaky faucet, a running toilet, a shut-off valve — touch none of the specialized records on this page. They run start to finish on the core records above.

The plumbing-specific records come into play for the fixtures you install and service over time, for maintenance plans, and for permitted installs.

What plumbing adds

On top of the core, a plumbing setup adds three things — each built on the same engine as the core records, with its own fields, its own stages where it needs them, and its own record page assembled from building blocks.

Installed fixtures are tracked as Equipment assets — the water heater, softener, sump pump, or backflow device you put in and return to.
Maintenance plans are held as Service Agreements that bring the customer back on a schedule.
Install permits are tracked as Permits for the bigger jobs a city requires you to pull paper on.

Installed fixtures as assets

The fixture is the water heater, water softener, sump pump, backflow preventer, or pressure-reducing valve you install at a property and service over time. It is the textbook Equipment pattern: one record per piece of gear, tracked across many jobs, building a service history.

It records the fixture name and type, the make and model, the serial number, the install date, the warranty expiry, where it sits on site, and a service status of Good, Due soon, or Overdue.

Each fixture belongs to a Customer.

A Job or Visit can reference the fixtures it touched, so every water heater and softener carries its own service history — what was done, when it was last flushed, and when its warranty runs out — for the next tech who opens the record on arrival.

Maintenance plans

A maintenance plan is held as a Service Agreement: the standing contract behind an annual water-heater flush, a softener check, or a whole-home plumbing inspection. It carries the plan name, the terms the customer signed, and the cadence the work repeats on.

The plan does the work through a recurring Job that generates the repeat Visits your crews drive to, and the Estimates and Invoices that bill the plan reference the agreement for their terms language. That is the engine behind a plumbing shop's recurring revenue.

Install permits

A Permit is the city or county authorization a bigger install depends on — a water-heater swap, a repipe, a new supply or waste line, a softener or backflow device.

It is a child of the Job it authorizes, and it has a lifecycle of its own, driven by the authority having jurisdiction rather than by your job.

It records the permit number, the type, the issuing authority, the application and approved dates, the fee, the expiration date, whether it is posted on site, and the scanned permit document.

A job can be in progress while its permit is still applied-for and waiting on the city, which is exactly why the permit is its own record with its own stages.

A minor repair — clearing a stoppage or swapping the working parts of a faucet or valve — usually needs no permit, so most service jobs carry none.

A permit comes in for the installs that modify supply, waste, or gas lines: water heaters, repipes, softeners, and backflow devices. The Permit record is there for those jobs and ignored on the rest.

Service lifecycle

A plumbing job moves through the same connected records whether it is a same-day clog or a planned water-heater install — the same backbone the core uses for every trade.

A Request captures the first contact and can convert straight to an Estimate, a Job, or an Invoice — you are not forced through every step for a quick repair.

The Estimate is often a multi-option Good / Better / Best quote the tech presents on site. A bigger install pulls a Permit on its own clock, while the Visit performed against a fixture writes back to that fixture's service history.

After payment, a customer on a plan loops back through their Service Agreement, which schedules the next maintenance Job.

Residential service vs. commercial / new construction

The same records serve both modes. What changes is which of them you lean on and how billing is shaped.

Residential service

Work flows Request → Job → Visit → Invoice, mostly one-off — a clog, a leak, a running toilet, a water-heater swap. The homeowner is both the payer and the site, and payment is usually a card charged on site.

The fixtures are a water heater, a softener, and a sump pump at one address, each on a simple service status. Permits are occasional — a heater swap or a softener install — often none or one per job. A maintenance plan keeps the customer on the books.

Commercial / new construction

A parent Customer owns many sites, and bigger jobs run rough-in through final over weeks. Nearly every install carries a permit, with sequenced inspections — rough-in before the walls close, then final — each one gating the next phase of work.

Billing is Net-30 with a purchase order, often consolidated, and the approval step runs through a building manager or general contractor. The three addresses on a Customer already handle a bill going to the GC while the work happens at the site.

The crew side flexes the same way. A single-truck operator runs one tech across every Visit; a multi-location shop assigns Visits across teams and locations using the same Job and Visit records.

The records do not change — only how many people, properties, and locations they span.

Built for any size. A one-person drain-and-rooter operation and a multi-location plumbing contractor run on the same backbone. Add the fixture, the maintenance plan, and the permit where you need them — residential leans on fixtures and plans, while commercial and new-construction work leans on the permit-and-inspection spine.

Built on the customization engine

Every specialized record above is a custom object built on the same engine you use to tailor anything else in FieldCamp.

None of it is special-cased.

The fixture service history, the maintenance-plan loop, and the permit lifecycle are all assembled from the same primitives any account can use — fields, stages and workflows, and the linked records that tie a fixture to its customer or a permit to its job.

Add your own objects and fields for the gear and paperwork your shop tracks — a fixture's anode-rod date or a permit's inspection result — define the stages each record moves through, and arrange every record page from the library of record layouts.

Set up an automation so the next maintenance Job creates itself from a Service Agreement.

The core flow works on day one; the customization layer makes it match how your shop actually runs.

Coming from ServiceTitan

Most plumbing shops on ServiceTitan can bring their structure into FieldCamp directly — customers, the locations under them, the fixtures and water heaters at each location, the jobs and appointments, the memberships, and the price book all have a home here.

The difference is that in FieldCamp you own and shape the model, rather than fitting your shop to a fixed one.

In ServiceTitan	In FieldCamp	Notes
Customer	Customers	The party responsible for billing. FieldCamp keeps billing, service, and property addresses on one record.
Location	A Property — as a custom object under the customer, or the customer's service address for a single-site home	ServiceTitan's one-customer-to-many-locations split; model it as its own record when a customer has several sites.
Equipment / Unit	Equipment	The installed water heater, softener, sump pump, or backflow device, tracked as an asset with full service history.
Job	Jobs	The work order — one-off for a drain clear, multi-day for a repipe, or recurring for a maintenance plan.
Appointment	Visits	Each scheduled trip on a job, with dispatch, en-route, on-site, and sign-off.
Project (grouping jobs)	A custom Project object that groups related Jobs at one site	Built on the same engine as custom objects.
Estimate / Invoice	Estimates & Invoices	Quoting with Good / Better / Best, deposits, and payments.
Payment	Recorded on the Invoice	Partial and full payments, with overdue tracking.
Membership / Recurring Service	Service Agreements	The plan that brings a customer back on a schedule and triggers the next maintenance Job.
Technician	Team Members	Carry license class as skills and territory as service areas.
Business Unit	A team or service area	Used to assign and report on work by group.
Price Book (Services / Materials / Equipment)	Price Book	Fixtures, water heaters, valves, fittings, and labor, with vendor pricing and taxable flags.
Forms	Job Forms	Leak-search and close-out forms that live on the visit for structured on-site capture.
Tags	Custom fields	Add a select or multi-select field to label and filter records.

What you gain. In ServiceTitan the structure is fixed — the objects, their fields, and how they relate are set for you.

In FieldCamp every one of those records is yours to rename, extend, restage, and relayout, so you can match your old setup first and then go past it with custom objects & fields and your own stages & workflows.

One honest difference. ServiceTitan ships a built-in membership billing engine that runs recurring invoice cycles on its own schedule.

FieldCamp models the membership itself as a Service Agreement that schedules the maintenance Job and carries the renewal date and plan price; the recurring billing then runs through the standard invoice flow rather than a separate billing engine.

If automatic dunning cycles are central to how you bill, plan that part of the move deliberately.