Yes, ServiceM8 can give you custom reports, but the ones that matter most are not built inside the app. The built in reports answer the common questions about jobs, invoices and staff. ServiceM8 15 added Office Agent Reports, which turn a plain English question into a chart or table you can explore. Everything past that, a document that pulls job, form and photo data together, runs on a schedule, or has to match what your customer expects, is built from the ServiceM8 API. A report like that is from $1,200 plus GST and takes five business days.
What the built in reports cover
ServiceM8's Reports area in the web dashboard covers the standard operational and financial questions: how many jobs are in each status, what has been invoiced and paid, what each staff member has done, and similar views over a date range. ServiceM8 also sells an advanced reporting pack as an add-on with more detail, and a few third party dashboard tools plug in on a subscription.
For most businesses that is enough for the weekly look at how things are going. The reports are quick, they are already there, and the numbers come straight out of the account. If you have never opened that screen, start there before paying anyone for anything.
What Office Agent Reports add in ServiceM8 15
ServiceM8 15, released in September 2026, added Office Agent Reports. From what ServiceM8 has published, you type a question in plain English, such as how many jobs were completed by category last quarter, and it produces a chart or table you can then explore in a tool called Report Explorer. It is aimed at the ad hoc question that used to mean exporting to a spreadsheet.
That is a real step up for internal questions. I would not recommend paying for a custom build to replace it. If your need is a quick chart for yourself, try it first.
Where they stop
Every reporting tool inside ServiceM8 works on the data one way: pick a report type, pick a range, look at the result. The requests I see in the ServiceM8 community fall outside that in the same few ways.
- Combining job, form and photo data into one document. An inspection report needs the site, the assets checked, the answers on the form, the photos from the job and the technician's sign off, on one page, in an order that makes sense to the reader. No built in report assembles that.
- The customer's format, not ServiceM8's. A property manager, a body corporate or a compliance auditor often has a layout they expect. Your logo, their wording, a certificate number, a next inspection date worked out twelve months on. Templates get you part of the way. A report that has to be right every time needs code.
- Scheduled delivery to your customers. The monthly summary that lands in a customer's inbox on the first of the month without anyone in the office remembering.
- Calculations the app does not do. The total value of all open quotes is a question that turns up in the community because it is not a built in view. Profit by job category, service intervals across a customer's assets, work done per site over a year. Each is a small calculation over data the API can read.
- Anything across two systems. ServiceM8 job data against Xero invoice data, or against a spreadsheet the office keeps, is outside every built in report by definition.
What a custom report from the API looks like
ServiceM8 has a documented REST API that reads jobs, clients, sites, form responses, attachments and more. A custom report is a small program that reads what it needs through that API, does the calculation or the assembly, and produces the document.
The one I am building now is an inspection report for a fire services business. The shape of it is typical. When a job is completed, the program reads the job, the site, the form the technician filled in on the job, and the photos attached to it. It lays them out in the format the customer's own compliance process expects, works out the next inspection date, and produces a PDF. The office can trigger it from a link, or it can run on a schedule and email the customer directly.
Three things make a build like this work rather than just exist. It is tested on real completed jobs, not sample data, so the odd cases (a job with no photos, a form question skipped) come out right. It is hosted somewhere that keeps running when nobody is watching, with a log the office can read. And it is documented in one page so that anyone can see what it reads and where it sends the result.
What it costs and how long it takes
A custom report is from $1,200 plus GST, with a 50% deposit and the balance when you have checked it against real jobs. The standard turnaround is five business days from deposit. Reports that need a lot of layout work or a second data source are quoted above the starting price, and the quote is fixed before I start.
You keep the code, the documentation and the hosting access. If ServiceM8 changes something later, Care at $252 a month covers monitoring and fixes, or you can call me when something breaks.
If you are not sure whether your report is a built in one, an Office Agent question or a custom build, that is exactly what a 15 minute call is for.