You just signed up for ServiceTitan. You’re looking at this enormous platform and wondering where to even start. The onboarding team is going to walk you through things, but they move fast, and there’s a lot coming at you at once. It helps to have a checklist.
This is the order I’d do things in if I were setting up a new ServiceTitan account from scratch. It’s based on what I learned running an HVAC company on the platform and what I’ve seen trip up other companies during their first month. Some of this will overlap with what your ServiceTitan onboarding specialist covers. Some of it won’t, because they’re focused on getting you live, and I’m focused on getting you live the right way.
What Onboarding Actually Looks Like
Before we get into the checklist, let me set your expectations. ServiceTitan’s onboarding isn’t one size fits all. There are two tracks.
If you’re migrating from a known platform like SuccessWare, Jobber, HouseCall Pro, QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, ESC, or a handful of others, you’ll typically go through a condensed one-week onboarding program. ServiceTitan already has processes for pulling data from these systems, so the timeline is tighter.
If you’re coming from a platform that’s not on that list, or if your setup is more complex, you’re looking at a three to four week onboarding process. Multi-trade companies, commercial operations, and anyone with a complicated data situation will land here.
Either way, onboarding focuses on five core workflows: booking, dispatching, estimates, payments, and accounting. Everything else gets layered on after go-live. That’s intentional. ServiceTitan wants you solid on the fundamentals before you start adding advanced features.
Week 1: The Foundation
Before you touch any of the fancy features, you need the basics in place.
Set up your user accounts and understand managed vs. non-managed technicians. Every technician in ServiceTitan is either managed or non-managed. Managed technicians can access the full pricebook, add items to invoices and estimates, collect payments, and receive credit for their work. Non-managed technicians are designed for helpers who are paid hourly. They can dispatch themselves, arrive at jobs, clock in and out, and complete forms, but they can’t touch the pricebook or collect payments on their own.
ServiceTitan bills you per managed technician. This matters because it affects how you set up your team and it’s something people try to game. Don’t do that. I’ve seen companies create one “floater” managed tech account and try to share it across multiple non-managed techs so they could collect payments without paying for more managed seats. ServiceTitan knows about this trick and they’re cracking down on it. The system checks that the managed tech assigned to a job was actually there before it lets them close it out. Just set it up the right way from the start.
Decide on your accounting software. ServiceTitan needs to connect to a third-party accounting system for your financial statements. My recommendation: if you’re a small to mid-size company, go with QuickBooks Online. If you’re enterprise-level, go with Sage Intacct. Both of these support the touchless journal entry integration, which automatically syncs your transactions in near real-time (every two minutes) with no manual steps.
If you’re currently on QuickBooks Desktop, I know this sucks to hear, but you should start thinking about switching to QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Desktop doesn’t support the touchless integration and probably never will. Intuit is clearly moving away from Desktop. They discontinued support for several Desktop 2021 editions, and their own website actively steers people toward Online. The writing is on the wall.
Sign up for ServiceTitan Payments. I can’t stress this enough. Use ServiceTitan’s built-in merchant services for payment processing. Without it, you’re running all payments outside of ServiceTitan, which means manual reconciliation for every transaction. Your credit card payments won’t auto-match with bank deposits. Membership billing gets complicated. Refunds become a headache. Deposits become a headache.
People push back on this because another processor might give them a slightly lower transaction rate. Fair enough. But the hours your bookkeeper spends on manual reconciliation and the mistakes that come from human error easily outweigh that savings. And don’t be afraid to negotiate your rate with ServiceTitan. Especially if you’re processing high volume.
Payments and financing setup is one of the top go-live blockers I see. Companies that wait until the last minute to sort this out end up scrambling on go-live day when their techs can’t collect payments in the field. Get it done in week one.
Week 2: Pricebook and Dispatch
These two areas are the engine of your daily operations. And I’m going to be blunt: pricebook readiness is the single biggest blocker to a successful go-live. I’ve seen it over and over. Companies that have their pricebook locked in before go-live have smooth launches. Companies that don’t are scrambling for weeks afterward.
Build (or import) your pricebook. The pricebook is where all of your services, materials, and equipment live. Services are what you sell to the customer. Materials and equipment are the parts you use to perform those services. They link together so that when a technician sells a service, the system knows what material was used, what it cost, and can generate purchase orders accordingly.
If you’re starting fresh, take this seriously. A sloppy pricebook causes problems for years. Every price, every material cost, every service time estimate feeds into your invoicing, your estimates, your job costing, and your reports. Bad data here means bad data everywhere.
If you’re importing an existing pricebook from another system, triple check the required fields. Name, code, description, and primary vendor are required. The import template has some tricky columns that aren’t obvious. Check ServiceTitan’s Knowledge Base article on the pricebook Excel template for the complete list.
One thing to know: if you’re building your pricebook in the Practice Environment to test before going live, export it regularly. The Practice Environment refreshes its data with each release cycle, and if you’ve been building for weeks without exporting, all that work gets overwritten. The Next Environment is even worse for this. It refreshes weekly. Don’t build anything important there.
Set up your dispatch board. The dispatch board is where your dispatchers live all day. Before go-live, you need:
Technician shifts. These define when each tech is available to work. Without shifts, capacity planning won’t function and schedule assistant won’t show availability. Set shifts up for at least the next few months. You can have them repeat daily or weekly and extend them way out into the future.
Teams. Organize your technicians into teams (service, install, sales, maintenance, etc.) so the dispatch board is grouped logically.
Board configurations. Decide between horizontal and vertical view. Set up your alert thresholds for late arrivals and over-time jobs. The defaults are pretty aggressive (5 minutes for late arrival). I’d set late arrival alerts to 20-30 minutes after the arrival window starts. That gives you a heads-up without flagging every minor delay.
Week 3: Call Booking and Workflows
Now that your pricebook and dispatch board are set up, turn your attention to how calls come in.
Configure your job types. Job types define what kind of work is being booked. Repair, maintenance, install, warranty, etc. Each job type can have different settings for skills required, default duration, and business unit assignment.
Set up your call reasons. These are the options your CSRs pick when classifying calls. Make sure each one has the correct isLead flag. This directly affects your marketing reports and CSR scorecards.
Set up arrival windows. If you tell customers “we’ll be there between 10 and 2,” then set that up as an arrival window in ServiceTitan. This feeds into schedule assistant and capacity planning. If you’re verbally offering arrival windows but not using them in the system, you’re creating a disconnect that leads to scheduling conflicts. I’ve seen this cause real problems on go-live day. When data gets imported from your old system, arrival windows and start times can get out of sync. Technicians show up during the arrival window but the actual start time in the system says something different. It confuses everyone.
Set Up Adaptive Capacity (Optional But Ideal). If your company is brand new to ServiceTitan, you can skip this during onboarding and come back to it later. But if you have the bandwidth, setting it up now pays off fast. Adaptive capacity lets you create rules that control how your dispatch board gets filled. You can reserve afternoon slots for emergency calls during busy season, limit certain job types to certain technicians, or block off time for maintenance so it doesn’t eat into your service availability. When a CSR books a job, they click “Get Adaptive Availability” and only see the time slots that fit your rules. They don’t have to think about strategy. The system handles it. The setup takes some planning on the backend, and you’ll want your dispatcher involved in building the rules. But once it’s running, your board fills smarter and your CSRs stop guessing
Week 4: Go-Live Prep
This is the part most people underestimate. Go-live isn’t just flipping a switch. ServiceTitan structures it as a full week process, and understanding what happens each day is going to save you a lot of stress.
Train your team in the Practice Environment. Every role should get at least one focused training session in the practice environment before they touch the live system. CSRs book practice calls. Dispatchers move practice jobs around the board. Techs open the mobile app in practice mode and run through a complete job from dispatch to payment.
Test your integrations. If you’ve connected QuickBooks or another accounting system, run through the full cycle. Create a job, add items, post the invoice, and verify it syncs correctly. If you’re using the touchless journal entry integration, check that invoices, payments, and deposits are appearing in your accounting software within a few minutes.
Set up your notification templates. ServiceTitan sends automated texts and emails to customers for appointment confirmations, dispatch notifications, arrival notifications, and review requests. Review the default templates and customize them to match your brand voice before go-live. You don’t want customers getting generic robo-texts on your first day.
What Go-Live Week Actually Looks Like
Here’s something your onboarding specialist will walk you through, but it helps to know the structure ahead of time.
Monday: Pre-Go-Live Review and Data Handoff. You’ll do a full walkthrough with your onboarder. They’ll verify your system setup, including business units, job types, notification settings, dispatch board, and estimate and invoice preferences. Then you’ll meet with the data team to submit your final customer list, job history, and accounts receivable balances for import.
Here’s the big thing nobody expects: a full data reset happens in your ServiceTitan account. This wipes all historical job and customer data but preserves your system settings. Your pricebook, job types, technicians, forms, and memberships all stay intact. You’ll lose access to ServiceTitan for about 15 to 45 minutes during the reset. After it’s done, anything you enter is permanent. No more test data, no more practice runs in the live environment.
Tuesday and Wednesday: Data Import. The data team imports your customer records, job history, and AR balances. Don’t log into ServiceTitan during this process. If you do, you might see wildly inaccurate numbers, like a customer showing a $10,000 balance when they actually owe nothing. That will resolve once the import is complete, but it’ll give you a heart attack if you’re not expecting it.
The gap data problem. Any jobs you complete between Monday’s final data pull and Thursday’s go-live won’t be in ServiceTitan. You’ll need to manually enter those after go-live. Assign someone on your team to track every job, payment, and customer interaction that happens during those gap days. If you don’t, you’ll have holes in your records that are hard to fix later.
Thursday: Go-Live Day. This is the real deal. You start booking and dispatching jobs, invoicing, and collecting payments in ServiceTitan. Your onboarder hosts a hypercare call (usually 1 to 1.5 hours) that morning to support your team, monitor job activity in real time, and tackle any issues. You’ll also start a burndown list to track questions and issues as they come up.
One critical rule: nobody should be using your old system on or after go-live day. Every new job and customer goes into ServiceTitan. Using both systems simultaneously leads to inaccurate financials, duplicated data, and reporting gaps.
Friday: Second Hypercare Call. Your onboarder checks in again to review how Thursday went, answer follow-up questions, and address anything on the burndown list.
The Following Monday or Tuesday: Accounting Export Call. This is where you learn how to batch, post, and export transactions to your accounting system. If you’re using the touchless journal entry integration with QuickBooks Online or Sage Intacct, this session confirms everything is syncing correctly. If you’re not exporting to an accounting platform, your onboarder will still show you how to batch and post transactions so your financials are properly closed out inside ServiceTitan.
After Go-Live: What to Expect
Your relationship with ServiceTitan doesn’t end at go-live. Here’s what the first 90 days typically look like.
For the first 30 days after go-live, expect weekly 30-minute calls with your success team. They’re checking in on how things are going, helping you troubleshoot issues, and making sure you’re actually using the core workflows correctly.
From days 60 to 90, those calls shift to bi-weekly. By this point, you should be comfortable with the basics and the conversations start focusing on optimization. What features should you turn on next? Where are the gaps?
After 90 days, you move to monthly calls and you’re in what ServiceTitan calls the “run” phase. You’ll have a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) by this point.
Don’t wait for these calls to ask questions. If something isn’t working, reach out. The first 90 days are when you have the most support available.
Common Onboarding Mistakes
These come from watching real implementations go sideways.
Skipping the pricebook. This is the number one go-live blocker. Some companies go live with a bare-minimum pricebook and plan to “fix it later.” Later never comes, and you end up with technicians adding manual line items to every invoice because nothing’s in the system. I’ve seen implementations turn red because the pricebook wasn’t ready, pushing go-live dates back by weeks. Build it right from the start, even if it takes extra time.
Not setting up technician shifts. Without shifts, schedule assistant doesn’t work, capacity planning doesn’t work, and your dispatch board gives no visual indication of when techs are available. This takes 30 minutes to set up. Do it.
Ignoring permissions. ServiceTitan has granular permission controls. Don’t give everyone admin access. CSRs don’t need to see payroll. Techs don’t need to edit the pricebook. Set permissions by role before go-live, not after someone accidentally changes something they shouldn’t have.
Not using ServiceTitan Payments from day one. If you start with a third-party processor and then switch to ServiceTitan Payments later, you’re going to have a messy transition period where some transactions are in one system and some are in another. Start with it.
Trying to implement everything at once. Inventory, marketing pro, configurable payroll, projects. These are all powerful features, but they don’t all need to be live on day one. In fact, ServiceTitan’s own onboarding team recommends sequencing them. Get the core up and running first: booking, dispatching, estimates, payments, accounting. Then add the pro products in phases. A common approach is to launch with Dispatch Pro and Pricebook Pro alongside core, then add Scheduling Pro, Marketing Pro, and Field Pro in the weeks after go-live.
Not mapping all your business units before go-live. I’ve seen this cause payment failures on go-live day. If a business unit isn’t properly mapped, payments won’t process on jobs assigned to it. Check every business unit, especially any new ones created after your initial data import.
Leaving payroll configuration to the last minute. Payroll rules, commission structures, and technician splits need to be finalized before go-live. Last-minute changes to payroll rules are one of the most common go-live day headaches. Get sign-off from whoever manages your payroll at least a week before launch.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does ServiceTitan onboarding take?
It depends on your starting point. If you’re migrating from a supported platform like SuccessWare, Jobber, HouseCall Pro, or QuickBooks, you may go through a condensed one-week program. If your setup is more complex or your data source isn’t on the supported list, plan for three to four weeks. Multi-trade and commercial operations typically take longer.
Can I use ServiceTitan before onboarding is complete?
Technically yes, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Incomplete setup means incomplete data. If your pricebook isn’t done, your technicians are going to improvise. If your accounting integration isn’t connected, your invoices aren’t going anywhere. Get through onboarding before you go live.
What’s the biggest mistake new ServiceTitan users make?
Not investing enough time in the pricebook. It’s the foundation of everything. Your invoices, estimates, job costing, reports, and even technician compensation all flow from the pricebook. If it’s wrong, everything downstream is wrong too.
What happens to my data during go-live?
There’s a full data reset early in go-live week that wipes test data and customer records from your ServiceTitan account. Your system settings (pricebook, job types, technicians, forms, memberships) are preserved. Then the data team imports your real customer data, job history, and AR balances. You’ll get a final AR/data signoff email that you need to verify before you start exporting anything to your accounting system.
Should I hire a third-party consultant for onboarding?
It depends on your resources. ServiceTitan’s onboarding team does a solid job of getting you functional. A third-party consultant adds value by bringing real-world experience from other companies, helping you set up workflows that make business sense (not just technical sense), and catching pitfalls that a standard onboarding might not address.
What support do I get after go-live?
You’ll have weekly 30-minute check-in calls for the first 30 days, bi-weekly calls from days 60 to 90, and then monthly calls after that. You’ll be assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) once your onboarding team confirms your account is stable. The transition from onboarding to success only happens after your final data signoff is complete and you’re actively exporting transactions to your accounting system.
The first 30 days on ServiceTitan set the tone for everything that comes after. Take the time to do it right and you’ll save yourself months of cleanup work later.
For a complete walkthrough of every module mentioned here, check out Blue Collar Nerd’s Ultimate ServiceTitan Guide. It covers everything from initial setup through advanced features, organized so you can work through it at your own pace.