ERP Tools
Tools for the on-premise ERP you already own
Your ERP is a capable system on a server in your building, and that one fact is why your reports, your photos, your money and your staff are all tied to one location. These tools change that without replacing anything.
The ERP API
A real, modern API over an ERP on a server in your building, so customers, jobs, parts, inventory, billing and purchase orders are reachable over the web, securely, by anything you approve.
Why this matters more than it sounds
Every interesting thing built for the trades in the last five years — AI phone receptionists that book jobs, scheduling services, review platforms, customer portals, marketing automation — assumes your system is in the cloud with an API on it.
Yours isn’t: it’s a SQL Server behind your firewall with no public presence at all, so when you call one of those companies the conversation ends at “which platform are you on?” You have been structurally excluded from the last ten years of innovation — not because it’s bad, but because nothing can reach or talk to it.
That is what this fixes: a live, two-way connection into your real system, not a data export or a nightly file.
What it reaches
64 routes over your ERP today, all documented, with a ready-to-run test collection of 76 requests.
- Customers and locations — search and create them.
- Dispatches — read a tech’s day, raise a new job, assign a tech, reschedule it, take it back.
- The time clock — move a visit through traveling, working, complete, with the server stamping the time.
- Parts and inventory — the whole catalog, plus on-hand quantities per truck and warehouse.
- Billing — add, change and remove parts and labor lines on a job, ready for your office to invoice.
- Purchase orders — raise one, list what’s on a job, and who spent the money.
- Vendors, employees, equipment, task codes and the ERP’s reference tables.
- Documents and photos — list, fetch, upload, and share by link.
- History — search across ten columns, including inside old notes.
Nothing is opened to the internet
This is the part your IT person will want, and what makes the whole thing acceptable.
- A small service inside your network dials out and holds the connection open. No port forward, no VPN, no inbound rule.
- Everything rides HTTPS end to end.
- Signing in takes a one-time code to a phone or email before any session exists. A password on its own gets you a challenge, not access.
- Sessions are signed and expire in 12 hours.
- Identity is stamped by the server and cannot be overridden. A caller can claim to be whoever they like in the request; the server ignores it and uses the signed session. That is what makes every other rule mean something.
- Creating things can be a separate permission. Raising dispatches, customers, buildings and POs can be restricted to named employees, and every attempt is logged with who asked — allowed or refused, whether or not you turn the restriction on.
- Each tier has its own health check, so “is it up?” is one request rather than a guess.
What you could plug in
An AI receptionist that actually books
It can look up the caller, find their building, see their history, and put a real dispatch in your ERP with a real number, instead of emailing your office a transcript to re-type.
A customer portal
Their equipment, their service history, their open jobs, their invoices — from the live system, not a nightly copy that is wrong by lunchtime.
Whatever you already use
Scheduling, reporting, a homegrown tool your office built in a spreadsheet: if it can call a web address and you approve it, it can reach your ERP.
Pricing We stand the API up over an on-premise ERP we already support and work directly with whoever you want to connect, quoted per shop. It runs in production today at one contractor, and rather than selling it self-serve we are taking on a small number of shops and doing it properly. Talk to us before you commit to a platform that says it can’t support your system.
ERP Cloud Hosting
We run your ERP on our own servers in a Tier 3 data center, and you reach it from anywhere — a laptop at home, a Mac, an iPad in a truck, a phone in an airport. It’s the same system and the same screens, no longer chained to one PC in the back room.
This is optional, and on-premise is not second-class. Plenty of shops keep their ERP in the building, and we support that completely — the field app doesn’t need hosting or care where your ERP lives. Hosting is for the shops where on-premise has stopped working.
It looks like your ERP is installed on your computer
This isn’t a web version of your ERP, and it isn’t a stripped-down anything. It’s the real program on a real server, appearing on your machine as an icon you double-click. Your staff will not notice a difference except that it’s faster and it works from home.
- Set up once, per computer. Then your ERP sits in the Start menu and on the taskbar like any other program.
- Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone and Android, from anywhere in the world with a connection.
- Your bookkeeper works from her kitchen, your owner checks a job from a hotel, and your second location stops needing slow VPNs.
- QuickBooks runs right beside it, on the same server, so your ERP and your books talk to each other exactly as they do today. We do this for contractors now.
- Printing just works — invoices come out of the printer next to your desk, not one in a data center. TSPrint is included, and it makes PDFs too.
Printing is the thing that sinks most hosted setups. An invoice your bookkeeper can’t print is a hosted system nobody will use, so we pay for the tool that solves it rather than leaving you to discover the problem in week two.
Your ERP as a desktop icon, ready to double-click.
One setup, done once, on each computer.
What stops being your problem
- Owning, patching and replacing server hardware.
- A fixed office PC being the only way into your ERP.
- Staff who can’t work from home, or a second branch that needs its own everything.
- Waiting on a vendor when something breaks at 3am.
- Losing access to your dispatches because a storm took out your office.
That last one isn’t hypothetical on the Gulf Coast. If your server is in the data center and your people have phones, you are still dispatching on the day your building has no power.
Everywhere at once, and safer than the alternative
The workaround for a remote worker is usually a VPN — which puts somebody’s home laptop onto your office network. That is the arrangement that gets exploited, and it is the one most contractors are quietly running right now.
- Nothing lands on the device. Your ERP runs in the data center and only the screen travels, so a laptop left at a truck stop holds no customer data; it never had any.
- No tunnel into your office. There is nothing to VPN into — your network stops being the thing that has to be defended.
- Access is a switch, not a scavenger hunt. Somebody leaves, you turn off one account, and they are out from every device they ever used.
- Your data sits where the cameras, the access controls and the backups are, not on a machine under a desk at a branch office.
Ubiquitous and secure usually pull against each other. Remote desktop is the rare case where what makes your ERP reachable from anywhere also stops the data going anywhere.
What’s actually behind it
This is the part most “cloud hosting” offers won’t put in writing.
- A Tier 3-qualified, SOC 2 Type II audited data center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania — audited every year by an outside firm, not self-certified.
- Multiple 10-gigabit fiber paths with diverse routing and diverse carriers — not one internet connection with a prayer behind it.
- On-site generators and a PPL priority restoration feed, with redundant A/B power to every rack and N+1 Liebert glycol cooling.
- A fully redundant 10-gigabit core, redundant storage arrays, and environmental and humidity monitoring throughout.
- Secured building, dual-entry access, cloud-based access control and IP video surveillance covering the floor.
- Backups you can actually restore from, down to a single file, with an off-site copy for disaster recovery.
- Nearly half its power comes from solar, which is not why you would choose it, but it is true and worth knowing.
The facility is Alerify in Harrisburg. The rack is ours and so are the machines in it — we own the hardware, run your ERP on it, and are who you call when something needs doing. Cimbrian has rented that rack for more than ten years, and has been running hosted servers since 1997, back when this was called PPTNet. We put the first contractor’s ERP on them in 2017.
And we know the software, not just servers
Plenty of IT companies will host a server for you. Very few of them understand the software running on it, which is how you end up explaining your own system to the person who’s supporting it.
- Since 2017 we have worked with more than 100 HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors on the ERP we support.
- We have handled ERP databases over 100 GB. If yours is slow enough that people have stopped running reports, that is a size problem with a known answer, and we have tuned it before.
- SQL work is ours, not a referral. Database optimization, index and query tuning, SQL Server upgrades, recovering failed instances — the things that decide whether your ERP feels quick or like wading.
- Integrations, Sheets and custom reporting. We get your data out to where the rest of your business needs it, on a schedule, without anybody re-keying it.
- An ERP vendor’s own support team has pointed customers at us in emergencies.
- Migration in is ours to do, and so is migration out: if you leave for another system entirely, we help you go.
- Month to month, no term, cancel any time, like everything else we sell.
Who this is for
If any of these sound like your shop, this is worth a conversation:
- Your ERP "server" is under a desk, and everyone knows it.
- Nobody is completely sure when the last good backup was.
- Office staff can’t work from home, or do it badly over some remote tool somebody set up years ago.
- You have more than one location, or you want one.
- Your SQL Server or Windows version is old enough that you’ve stopped asking about it.
- You’re facing a hardware quote that made you wince.
Pricing $300 per month for the hosted environment, plus $10 per month for each desktop user. QuickBooks can be hosted alongside it — ask us and we’ll price your exact setup and user count before you decide.
Sheets reporting
Your ERP data, landing in a Google Sheet on its own, every few minutes.
Every shop has the same story: the one report you need is the one your ERP won’t produce, so somebody exports, pastes and rebuilds it by hand every week, and it’s wrong by Wednesday.
- The spreadsheet updates itself. Set a report to refresh every few minutes and it just does, pulling straight from your database. Nobody re-exports anything, ever.
- A library of reports for the ERP we already support — invoices and sales, sales by department, by zone and by salesman, dispatch activity, inventory on hand, customers and locations, chart of accounts, income statement, balance sheet.
- Or any report you can describe. If it’s in your database, it can be a tab in your sheet.
- Turn a report on or off, or change how often it runs, by editing one row. The whole thing is driven by a control spreadsheet — no code, no redeploy, no waiting on us.
- Payroll, commission, job costing, tech performance, aging — the things you currently rebuild in a corner of a whiteboard.
- Share it the normal way. Bookkeeper, accountant and service manager each get the view they need. Charts, pivots and conditional formatting come free, because it’s a real Google Sheet.
And it goes back the other way, where that helps
Some things are easier to type in a spreadsheet than in your ERP. A few purpose-built workflows read what your office typed and put it into the ERP — adding a customer and location, bulk-scheduling dispatches, posting notes onto invoices and quotes — then write the ERP’s own number back next to the row so nobody has to go looking for it.
To be precise, because it matters: the report tabs are a one-way picture of your ERP and get rewritten on each refresh, so typing into one changes nothing. Writing back happens through those specific workflows, built for the job.
How it runs
- A small connector runs on your own network, next to your database.
- It dials out to Google. Nothing listens, and no inbound port is opened — same as the field app.
- Each report carries its own refresh schedule, in minutes. It isn’t instant, and we’d rather say so than have you find out.
- One master switch turns the whole thing off if you ever need it stopped.
- We set it up and tune it for your shop, and it has been running for contractors since 2020.
The point isn’t the spreadsheet. The point is that the numbers you run on stop being a canned report and become current data you control and everyone acts on.
Pricing Sheets reporting is priced separately from the field app, and depends on how many reports you want and how much shaping they need. Tell us what you want to see and we’ll quote it in the first conversation.
Document Exporter
Your techs have been photographing jobs for years. Try getting one of those photos out of your ERP in a hurry.
In the ERP we already support, every attachment — job photos, signed work orders, scanned tickets, permits, dataplates — is stored in a form that is awkward to get back out: one at a time, through the desktop, by somebody at the office.
- Point it at OneDrive or Google Drive and it builds the folders for you, mirroring how your work is organized.
- You set the naming pattern. Files come out named the way your office thinks — by job, by site, by date, by whatever you already use — not by a database key.
- Field photos, purchase orders, site documents, equipment photos, signed paperwork — everything your ERP has been quietly collecting.
- Real filenames and real file types restored. A JPEG comes out as a JPEG, a PDF as a PDF, opening in one click.
- Then your whole team can reach it — the office, the estimator, the owner on a phone — using the Drive or OneDrive they already have, with the sharing and search they know.
- It works at real volume, not demo volume.
We measured one customer’s ERP in August 2026: 331,479 attachments, 137 GB — 299,293 photos and 25,139 PDFs. That is a decade of evidence about your own work, currently doing nothing for you.
Years of it, all in there.
Pricing Quoted per shop, based on how much is in there and where you want it to land. Ask us and we’ll size it against your actual data.
Card and ACH payments, done right
Your customer pays their invoice online at 2am and the payment lands back in your ERP by itself. Where your state allows it, the card fee is passed through instead of coming out of your margin, with a free way to pay always on the table.
Pay Your Bill, on your own website
- A Pay Your Bill page on your site, in your branding.
- The customer enters their invoice number and their account number — both, deliberately. One number alone can’t be used to go fishing for somebody else’s balance.
- They see the real invoice: every line, the quantities, the tax, the amount due — the same detail your ERP printed.
- More than one invoice open? They pick which one they’re paying.
- Partial payments work properly. The balance is recalculated and the invoice stays open for the rest.
- Card on file, if they want it kept for next time.
They pick from their open invoices.
The real lines, not a bare total.
The fee, handled legally
Card processing costs about three percent. Most shops quietly absorb it, which means the more your customers pay by card, the less you make. Passing it through is legal in most states — but only if it is done the way the card networks and that state require, which is why it isn’t something a software company should be improvising.
- eBizCharge applies the surcharge, not us. They add it at the point of payment, under the laws of the customer’s state. Keeping that decision with the processor is the entire point.
- Where the state doesn’t allow it, it isn’t charged — and the 3% comes off your side instead. That’s the honest trade, and you should know which side of it you’re on before you sign up.
- Debit cards are never surcharged. That’s a card-network rule, and the form holds to it.
- ACH / e-check is available, switched on by eBizCharge, and carries no fee to the customer.
- So your customer always has a free way to pay — debit or ACH — and is told which is which before they choose, in plain words on the form rather than as a surprise on the receipt.
We’re not lawyers and this isn’t legal advice. Surcharging rules differ by state and they change; eBizCharge maintains those rules as part of their compliance program and your merchant agreement governs. What we will tell you plainly is that doing this badly is worse than not doing it at all — which is exactly why we let the processor own it.
Said plainly before they choose: debit pays no fee.
It posts itself back into your ERP
- Nobody re-keys a payment. The money moves and your ERP updates, including partial payments and the remaining balance.
- Card numbers never touch your systems or ours. The payment form is hosted by the processor. What comes back is the last four digits, the card type and an authorization code. That is a far smaller compliance problem for a plumbing company to own.
- No hole in your firewall. Same as the field app: the connection is dialed out from inside your network, so nothing inbound is opened on the server that runs your business.
- A missed notification self-heals. Every fifteen minutes a background check looks for payments that didn’t post and posts them — and a payment already recorded can’t be recorded twice.
- Customers who aren’t set up with the processor yet are created automatically from their ERP record, so your office doesn’t maintain a second customer list.
It’s a certified eBizCharge integration, taking real customer money today on an ERP we already support.
Hosted by the processor, not by you.
On your website, in your branding. Find → review → pay.
Pricing Setup is quoted per shop; card and ACH processing rates come from your eBizCharge merchant account. Ask us and we’ll walk you through both numbers before you commit to either.
Connectors
You already pay for tools that would be far more useful if they knew what your ERP knows. Right now, they don’t.
HubSpot
Your customers, jobs and service history where your sales and service people already work — instead of two systems that disagree about who the customer is.
Listrak & email platforms
Real customer and equipment data driving your email — maintenance reminders, seasonal work, follow-up on an estimate that never closed.
SMS and texting
On-my-way texts, appointment reminders, a photo of the finished work — triggered by what actually happened on the job, not by somebody remembering.
Zapier
The catch-all: if what you want to connect has a Zapier connection, your ERP can reach it without anybody writing software.
AI scheduling
Booking, confirming and re-booking handled without tying up a dispatcher, against your real availability.
Something else
Once there’s a safe door into your ERP, most connections are a conversation, not a project. Tell us what you want to join up.
Pricing Connectors are quoted per integration — it depends entirely on what you’re joining to what. Tell us the two systems and we’ll give you a number.
The SQL toolkit
If you’d rather build it yourself, this is the plumbing.
Everything on this page stands on the same foundation: 70 stored procedures, in a schema of their own, written against the database of an ERP we support. They hold years of working out how it stores a dispatch, what a visit really is, which table a note lives in, and how a new customer number gets minted without colliding with one the ERP issues five minutes later.
- Read anything — dispatches and visits, customers and locations, equipment, parts and stock, purchase orders, invoice lines, task codes, the reference tables.
- Write safely — create a customer, a location, a dispatch, a purchase order; move a visit through the clock; merge a note without stamping on what somebody else wrote.
- The numbering is handled. Customer, location, dispatch and invoice numbers come out of the ERP’s own counter the way it does it, which is the easiest thing to get wrong and the one that causes damage you cannot easily undo.
- They are kept under version control, captured from both your live and training databases, with a manifest of what exists and where the two differ.
- Your developer can use them directly from anything that speaks SQL, without going through us.
Most contractors won’t want this, and that’s fine — it’s here for the shop that has somebody technical, or a software partner already building something, and needs the hard part solved.
Honest warning, because this is what bites: an ERP upgrade can remove or break routines added to its database. That is manageable when somebody is watching for it, and expensive when nobody is.
Pricing Quoted with whatever it is supporting — usually part of an API or integration engagement rather than a thing you buy on its own. Ask.