Housecall Pro's built-in payroll feature calculates pay from technician timesheets and an hourly or salaried rate, and it does that part correctly on its own. What it doesn't model natively is variable per-job pay: a percentage-of-ticket commission, a flat SPIFF bonus for selling a maintenance plan, or a tiered rate that increases once a technician crosses a monthly threshold. Those structures still need to get calculated somewhere, and that somewhere is usually a spreadsheet right now.
Technicians clock in and out through the Housecall Pro mobile app, and the payroll feature multiplies logged hours by an hourly rate, applying straightforward overtime rules for a single location. For a business paying technicians a flat hourly wage with no commission structure, this covers the job completely on its own.
Where it starts to strain is anywhere pay depends on something other than hours worked: what a technician sold, how much a job actually billed for, or a bonus tied to a specific type of sale.
A lot of trades businesses pay technicians a percentage of the ticket, or a flat SPIFF bonus every time they sell a membership or maintenance plan, sometimes layered with a tiered rate that increases once someone crosses a revenue threshold for the month. None of that is something Housecall Pro's payroll feature calculates on its own.
The usual fallback is manual: someone exports a job list, cross-references which jobs each technician closed, applies the company's actual commission rules by hand, and re-enters the totals into payroll. That's slow even for one location, and it gets genuinely error-prone the moment a business runs multiple sites with slightly different overtime or commission rules at each one.
A completed job's data runs through your actual commission rule, percentage of ticket, tiered threshold, flat rate, whatever it is, and the result feeds straight into payroll, so the payroll run becomes a review instead of a recalculation from scratch.
Membership and maintenance-plan sales tracked in Housecall Pro get matched to the SPIFF rule automatically, so bonus payouts are accurate every cycle instead of someone combing through a month of jobs by hand to figure out who earned what.
Tell us how technicians get paid beyond their hourly rate, and we'll scope what automating that calculation would take.
Tell us the actual rule, a flat percentage, a tiered threshold, a bonus for a specific sale, and we'll check what Housecall Pro's data can feed automatically. And if payroll isn't the manual process costing your office the most time, that's fine too, we automate whatever's eating hours in your business, not just this one.
Let's talk →Yes, for straightforward hourly or salaried pay calculated from technician timesheets. It handles that case correctly without any custom work.
Not natively. Variable, per-job pay like a percentage-of-ticket commission or a flat bonus for a specific sale isn't something Housecall Pro's payroll feature models; that calculation usually happens manually or through a custom automation fed by Housecall Pro's job data.
Housecall Pro's payroll feature applies its overtime logic per account, so a franchise running separate accounts per location already has separation there, but reconciling different commission structures across those locations is still a manual exercise unless it's automated.
Housecall Pro's API exposes job and employee data that can feed a dedicated payroll system like Gusto or ADP, which is the usual path for businesses whose pay structure, commission, SPIFFs, multi-location overtime, outgrows what Housecall Pro's own payroll feature calculates.