Spring 2026 Product Update: Everything New in Dispatch Scout

Stop guessing whether they saw it.

Every invoice and estimate now records when the customer opens the email and when they view the customer portal. The timeline on the document shows the exact timestamps, and the sender gets a notification the moment a customer engages.

That tiny signal changes how follow-up works. If a $9,400 system estimate has been viewed three times in two days but never signed, you don’t need to wait a week before checking in — you call today, while the homeowner is clearly still thinking about it. If it’s been sitting unread for ten days, you know the email got buried and a different approach is needed.

Pass the 3% along, legally and cleanly.

Processing fees are the second-largest line-item cost for most service shops after labor — and unlike payroll, they’re a 100% margin killer. We built a full surcharging system into Dispatch Scout that adds a configurable percentage to credit-card payments only (never ACH), with the surcharge clearly disclosed on every invoice, estimate, and customer-facing payment page.

The system handles the disclosure language required for legal pass-through. Turn it on once per location; every invoice and proposal updates automatically.

For a shop running $1.5M annually with 60% on credit cards, that’s roughly $27,000/year of recovered margin — about the cost of a new entry-level truck.

You’re no longer locked into Stripe — and techs can take payment by tapping a phone.

Stripe is great. It’s also expensive once you cross a certain volume, and the residual-revenue side of the merchant-processing world is genuinely lucrative for owners who negotiate. Dispatch Scout now connects directly to Authorize.net and NMI — the two processors most independent merchant providers in home service resell on top of — so you can shop your processing rate without giving up your software.

Better yet, both gateways support Tap-to-Pay on iPhone and Android, meaning your tech’s phone is the credit-card reader. No dongle, no Bluetooth pairing fights, no separate Square account. Open the invoice, tap “Take Payment,” hold the customer’s card against the phone, done.

Finally know which ads drive revenue — not just which drive clicks.

Every dollar you spend on Google, Facebook, Yelp, or door-hangers wants to be measured. The problem in home service is that most leads pick up the phone instead of filling out a form — and a phone call from a Google Ads click is invisible unless you instrument it.

This spring we shipped a complete call-tracking platform: provision dedicated numbers for every campaign or marketing source, route calls intelligently by business hours, record and transcribe conversations, and score them with AI for lead-quality. The whole system runs natively on Twilio, with optional CallRail integration for shops already paying for it. Every call ties back to the lead, the customer, the job, and ultimately the invoice — so “cost per booked job by source” becomes a report you can actually pull.

For HVAC and plumbing shops spending five figures a month on lead generation, this is genuinely the single most important number in the business. Now you have it.

Read the full call tracking writeup

Your morning briefing, written by AI.

Every morning, Dispatch Scout sends you a short, written summary of the state of your business: jobs scheduled vs. completed, revenue booked yesterday, calls answered vs. missed, estimates that aged past their follow-up window, jobs without invoices, technicians running behind, and any anomalies worth a second look. It’s the email an experienced operations manager would write you — if you had an experienced operations manager with nothing else to do.

Owners use it as their first cup-of-coffee read. GMs use it to pre-load their morning huddle. Either way, it’s a fundamentally different relationship with your data than “log in and pull the report.”

Power-dialer plus the customer’s record on screen the moment the phone rings.

For shops with a real sales or CSR floor, the difference between a good day and a great day is reps-per-hour and how prepared each rep is on every call. We integrated with Spitfire, a serious power-dialer used by mid-market sales operations, so outbound calls from Dispatch Scout flow through Spitfire’s queue-and-progressive-dialing engine.

The killer feature is the screen-pop: the second a call connects, the customer’s full Dispatch Scout record — history, open estimates, jobs, equipment on file — pops on the agent’s screen. No frantic searching while saying “hi, this is so-and-so from…” The agent is ready before the customer finishes saying hello.