Simpro automation for commercial contractors
At 20, 50 or 150 field staff the problem stops being speed and starts being visibility. Simpro holds the data. We build the layer that reads it every morning and tells your people what is about to go wrong.
The event pipeline
AI Overview
Simpro (often written simPRO) is field service and contractor management software founded in Brisbane, covering service jobs, asset maintenance, projects, inventory and contractor management in 1 platform. It publishes a documented REST API and a webhook subscriptions endpoint, plus a sandbox environment on request, which makes it the most integration-friendly of the major Australian trade platforms. Because webhook subscriptions apply across an entire company rather than a filtered subset, practical Simpro AI automation is built as a filter and routing layer that turns a high volume event stream into a small number of exceptions worth a person's attention: maintenance visits at risk of breaching an SLA, purchase orders never receipted, jobs running past estimate, and RCTIs sitting unapproved.
Read this first
This page is for contractors, not sole traders.
Most AI automation content pretends every trade business is the same. Simpro customers are not. If you run service and projects and asset maintenance and a warehouse, with multiple crews and a contractor network, you have a genuinely different problem to a plumber with a ute. We would rather scope this honestly than sell you a build that does not match your size.
Good fit if you have
- 15 or more field staff, or several crews across branches
- Recurring maintenance contracts with SLA obligations
- Stock held across more than 1 storage location or vehicle
- Projects billed progressively rather than job by job
- Subcontractors working through the contractor portal
- An office team already producing manual exception reports in Excel
Poor fit if you
- Run 1 to 5 staff and only use the job and invoice modules
- Have been on Simpro under 6 months and are still bedding down process
- Have inconsistent data entry, since automation multiplies bad data
- Want a chatbot on the website rather than operational automation
- Would be better served by Tradify or ServiceM8 and a smaller build
5 automations that suit the way Simpro is actually used.
These are operational and financial controls, not customer SMS gimmicks.
Maintenance SLA Risk Watch
Simpro schedules recurring preventive maintenance against customer assets. The automation reads what is due, compares it to what is actually booked and resourced, and flags the contracts about to breach their window while there is still time to move a crew.
Stock and Purchase Order Exceptions
Live stock across storage locations is only useful if someone reads it. Each morning the automation surfaces the orders raised but never receipted, the items below minimum levels, the variance from the last count, and the jobs consuming more material than they were estimated.
Progress Claim Preparation
Projects billed on progress need a narrative, not just a percentage. The AI drafts the claim summary from job costing, scheduling and site notes so your project manager edits a draft instead of starting from a blank page at month end.
Contractor and RCTI Chasing
Subcontractors mark work complete through the contractor portal and RCTIs wait on approval. The automation tracks which job cards came back incomplete and which recipient created tax invoices have been sitting unapproved, then chases the specific person holding each one.
Asset History to Client-Readable Reports
Test readings and service history sit in the asset records in a format your client will not read. The AI turns a site's asset history into a plain-English condition report with recommendations, ready for your account manager to check and send.
Related builds: automated reporting, document processing, and AI agents for the multi-step ones.
The technical shape of a Simpro build.
Worth understanding before you brief anyone, including us.
API Access and a Sandbox
Simpro publishes a developer centre with documented REST endpoints and token authentication, and provides a sandbox company on request. We build and test there first, so nothing experimental ever runs against your live jobs.
Subscribe, Then Filter Hard
Webhook subscriptions fire company-wide rather than for a chosen customer or branch, so the filtering has to live in our layer. Cost centre, job type, value threshold and branch rules decide what survives. This step is the difference between a useful system and an alert nobody reads.
Route to a Person, Write Back Safely
Each surviving exception goes to the individual who can act on it, with the context already assembled. Anything touching an invoice, a compliance record or a client document is drafted for approval rather than sent. Non-financial write-backs such as job notes keep your audit trail complete.
Example Scenario
The 4 leaks that show up in nearly every large Simpro account.
Illustrative patterns, not a specific client, and we are not attaching a dollar figure to any of them. Your own numbers come out of the audit.
01The maintenance visit that quietly drifts
A recurring service is scheduled, the crew gets pulled onto a breakdown, and the visit slides past its contracted window. Nobody notices until the client does. The data was in Simpro the whole time, just not in front of anyone.
02The purchase order that never got receipted
Material arrives on site, the job gets done, and the order is never closed out. Stock on hand stops matching reality and job costing quietly drifts from the truth on a slow cycle that is painful to unwind later.
03The project running past estimate in week 2
Labour hours and material consumption tell you a project is heading over well before the progress claim does. Most contractors find out at month end, which is roughly 3 weeks after the point where it could still be corrected.
04The RCTI nobody approved
A subcontractor completes the work, the recipient created tax invoice sits waiting for an approval that is not anybody's specific job, and the relationship gets strained over an administrative gap rather than a real dispute.
None of these need clever AI to fix. They need something reading the data every morning and telling a named person what changed. That is the boring part of this work and it is the part that pays.
What a Simpro build costs.
Workflow Automation
From $2,500 setup
Plus from $500 per month. Simpro projects generally sit higher in the $2,500 to $15,000 range than the small platform builds, because there are more modules, more branches and more approval paths to respect.
AI Agents
$5,000 to $15,000+
For the multi-step work: an agent that investigates an exception across several modules, assembles the context and proposes an action for a human to approve.
Full breakdown on the pricing page. Simpro's own licence pricing is quoted by their sales team, so budget that separately. Team training is $200 to $500 per seat if you want your office staff running changes themselves.
Simpro + AI questions answered.
Does Simpro have an API we can build against?
Can we subscribe a webhook to just 1 branch, customer or job type?
Simpro is adding its own AI features. Why would we pay for this as well?
We run 40 field staff across multiple branches. Where should we start?
Is this a fit for a small trade business with 3 or 4 staff?
Will this interfere with our accounting sync or our compliance records?
Free AI Audit for Simpro Contractors
Bring the exception reports your office is already building by hand. We'll work out which of them can be generated from the Simpro API instead, and which of your problems are process problems that no automation will fix.
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