Utility Locating Ticket Management Software: Custom Build vs Irth and KorTerra for Contract Locators
Buy Irth or KorTerra if you run a single state operation under a few hundred tickets a day for one or two utility clients. The one call integrations are already built and per ticket pricing has not yet become your dominant cost.
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Buy Irth or KorTerra if you run a single state operation under a few hundred tickets a day for one or two utility clients. The one call integrations are already built and per ticket pricing has not yet become your dominant cost. Build once you pass roughly 1,500 tickets a day, or once per client service level rules are being applied from memory rather than by software.
What the established locating platforms already solve
You are paid per ticket, and the margin on a ticket is thin enough that one wasted truck roll to a site where your client owns nothing is a direct loss. That is the business you actually run, and it is worth saying that two products already carry a large part of it.
Irth Solutions and KorTerra both handle ticket intake, screening and dispatch workflow at real volume, and the unglamorous thing they do best is parsing one call centre formats. There are dozens of them, some still arriving as fixed width file drops rather than a modern interface, and each carries its own quirks and its own positive response mechanism. That is genuine engineering that has already been paid for, and nobody should assume they will rebuild it in a sprint. PelicanCorp covers similar ground internationally. ProStar sits alongside rather than against them, aimed at precision capture of what is actually in the ground.
If you serve one or two utility clients in a single state and run a few hundred tickets a day, buy. The licence is not yet your dominant cost, the integrations are done, and building at that scale is a distraction from hiring locators. That is the recommendation we give most contractors who call, and it means less work for us.
Where they stop: the client is a dimension, not a field
Here is the workflow no ticket product models properly, and it is the reason contract locators reach for custom software while facility owners often do not. These platforms were built for the utility side of the relationship. You sit on the other side of it, serving many utilities at once.
Each client has its own audit programme, its own quality sampling expectations, its own damage investigation format, its own invoicing basis and its own opinion about what a completed ticket means. One pays per ticket received, one per screened ticket, one blends a standby rate. One has an internal service level tighter than the statute. One requires a call to the excavator before marking on certain ticket types. One has a remark rule that applies only to its transmission assets. So the effective deadline on any ticket is a function of jurisdiction, client, ticket type and asset class, and it changes when a client renegotiates.
The products give you a due date and a client field. What you need is a client dimension running through the whole model, with rules, service level overlays, evidence requirements, sampling rates, invoicing basis and reporting format hanging off the client record. Without it, those rules live in a dispatcher's head and get applied inconsistently, which is how a good operation loses a contract without ever having a damage.
The second place they stop is your margin. Screening accuracy is not a compliance nicety for you, it is the profit lever, and it depends on things only you know: that a client's mapping in one township is fifteen feet off because it was digitised from paper, that a particular excavator's tickets always turn out to be hand digs, that a corridor was rebuilt last spring and the as-builts have not reached the geographic system yet. Those are local corrections nobody can sell you.
The arithmetic: per ticket licence against locator productivity
Put three numbers on one page. First, your platform cost divided by tickets processed last year, which is your licence cost per ticket. Second, your revenue per ticket, blended across clients. Third, your fully loaded cost per field visit including the truck.
Now the number that decides everything: your unbillable visit rate, meaning the share of tickets where a locator drove out and found nothing the client owns. Multiply that rate by your visit cost by your annual ticket count. In most operations that figure dwarfs the licence, and it is the figure a build competes against, not the subscription.
The crossover is a daily ticket rate crossed with a client count. Under about 300 tickets a day for one or two clients in a single state, buy. Between 300 and 1,500 a day it turns on clients: three or more with genuinely different service level overlays and invoicing bases pulls the crossover down sharply, because the reconciliation work is monthly and permanent. Above roughly 1,500 tickets a day the per ticket licence has become a visible line in your profit and loss, and a build amortised over five years usually costs less than a single year of it, before counting any improvement in unbillable visits.
What a custom build actually costs, plus migration and year two
In Digital Heroes delivery experience, a first release covering one call ticket intake and parsing for your states, screening with configurable buffers and full decision logging, geography and skill based assignment, and positive response with computed statutory and client clocks runs $65,000 to $140,000 over 12 to 16 weeks. A full platform adding the offline locator application with evidence capture, per client rule overlays and portals, quality auditing, damage investigation and client invoicing runs $170,000 to $400,000 phased over 7 to 12 months.
Data migration runs 10 to 25 percent of build cost. For a contractor the expensive object is not tickets, it is client configuration: every service level overlay, sampling rate, invoicing basis and reporting format currently held in contracts, emails and one dispatcher's memory has to be written down before it can be modelled. Budget that as discovery time, because it is genuinely the work.
Year two and after runs 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually. In this business that is client churn and centre change: you win a client and configure them, a centre changes its format, a state revises its rules. If adding a new client requires engineering rather than configuration, the model was wrong and you will feel it every time you sell.
What pushes cost up: the number of one call centres, because each format and each positive response mechanism is its own integration; the number of states; whether you pull live facility layers from each client's mapping environment or consume a monthly export; and whether the field application must run on rugged devices alongside specific locating equipment, which adds hardware testing.
The four situations where building wins
Regulatory fit. Statutory notice periods, business day counting, holiday handling, emergency ticket treatment and the available positive response codes all vary by state and by centre. Add your clients' own obligations on top, and the deadline becomes a computed value with a stated derivation rather than a date somebody typed. Alarming only on breach gives you an incident log. Predicting breach from current queue depth and travel time gives you a dispatch system.
Scale economics. Past 1,500 tickets a day, per ticket pricing scales with the excavation activity that is also your revenue, so the licence takes a fixed share of your margin forever regardless of how well you run.
A workflow that is your advantage. Screening accuracy fed by outcome. When a locator arrives and finds nothing, that should become data about mapping quality in that area rather than a shrug. Over a year that feedback loop is what moves your unbillable visit rate, and it is the closest thing this industry has to a compounding asset.
Integration sprawl across three or more systems. Count them: each one call centre, each client's mapping environment, your field devices, your payroll and productivity reporting, your invoicing, and the damage reporting format each client expects. Once a month end crosses three, the invoice becomes a spreadsheet exercise and disputes get settled by whoever has better records, which is not always you.
How to decide in a week: reconcile one month end
Take last month's invoice to your largest client and rebuild it from source. Not from the report the platform produced, from the underlying tickets. Then answer four questions with your operations manager and your controller in the same room.
How many hours did rebuilding it take. How many line items could not be tied back to a ticket, an assignment and a completion. How many tickets were billed at a basis you had to look up in the contract rather than read from a system. And how many were disputed or written off in the last twelve months.
If rebuilding takes under half a day and disputes are rare, your problem is not software and you should buy. If it takes two days and you write off real money every quarter, the client dimension is the build case and it will keep costing you every month until it is fixed. Run one more check alongside it: sample 200 completed tickets and count how many carry an offset measurement to something permanent and an explicit record of where nothing was found. That percentage is your defensibility, and most operations are surprised by it.
Then pay for a discovery phase rather than accepting a free proposal. At Digital Heroes that produces a signed product requirements document before any code exists: the client configuration model, clock derivation per state and per client, the evidence schema, invoicing basis, acceptance criteria and a fixed price. You keep that document whichever firm builds, and it is what makes competing quotes comparable.
Who we are wrong for: single client contractors, anyone under 300 tickets a day, and anyone wanting locating equipment integration as the primary goal. We work as India LLP, US LLC and UK LTD entities so intellectual property assigns under your own law, you own the repository from the first commit, and you meet the named engineers before signing. More than fifty specialists, over 2,000 projects, checkable on Clutch, Trustpilot, Fiverr Vetted Pro and D-U-N-S.
Book a 30-minute call with Digital Heroes and get a written plan and a fixed quote within 48 hours.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- PTC identifies the leading causes of failed first visits as parts unavailability (the single most-cited complaint, named by 51% of field service executives), technicians lacking the required equipment or skills, and insufficient time allocated to the job - making parts logistics and skills-based dispatch the highest-leverage fixes. Source: PTC (2023) →
- Salesforce's field-service research (State of Service / field service trends, survey of 5,500+ service professionals) found that 74% of mobile workers report increasing workloads and 47% say appointments don't go as planned due to customer miscommunication, unaccounted-for parts, or insufficient appointment lengths and travel times. (The separate claim that admin tasks consume ~30% of a technician's hours is NOT supported by the report - the seventh-edition data instead states technicians spend about 18% of working hours, ~7 hours/week, on admin, and only ~32% of time interacting with customers.). Source: Salesforce (2024) →
- EMARKETER reports that over 54% of mobile commerce transactions now happen within shopping apps rather than mobile browsers, underscoring the app channel's growing dominance of m-commerce. Source: EMARKETER (2025) →
- Companies in the top quartile of McKinsey's Developer Velocity Index had 2014-18 revenue growth four to five times faster than bottom-quartile peers, showing that software-building capability is a driver of business performance, not just a support function. Source: McKinsey & Company (2020) →
Frequently asked questions
How long does a custom locating platform take a contractor to build?
Twelve to sixteen weeks for a first release covering ticket intake and parsing for your states, screening with logged decisions, assignment and positive response with computed clocks. The locator application, client overlays and portals, quality auditing, damage investigation and invoicing add seven to twelve months. Launch with your two highest volume states and one client, then add the rest as configuration.
Who owns the ticket and evidence data if the developer relationship ends?
You should own the repository, the cloud accounts and the data outright, agreed in writing before kickoff. Your evidence is what defends you in a claim and what proves your performance to a client at renewal, so it cannot live in someone else's account. At Digital Heroes the client owns everything from the first commit and can hire any other firm to continue.
What happens when we win a client with unusual rules?
That is the test of whether the build was designed correctly. Adding a client should be configuration: rules, service level overlay, evidence requirements, sampling rate, invoicing basis and reporting format entered against a client record. If it requires engineering, the client was modelled as a field rather than as a dimension, and every future sale carries a development cost you did not price into the bid.
Can we build only the invoicing and reporting side?
You can, and for contractors losing money at month end it is a defensible first phase, provided your existing platform will export ticket, assignment and completion data reliably. Test that export before designing around it. The limitation is that invoicing accuracy depends on completion accuracy, so if your field records are weak, better invoicing simply bills the same disputed work more tidily.
Should a small locating contractor build anything?
No. Under about 300 tickets a day for one or two clients in one state, buy a product and spend the difference on locators and trucks. The integrations you would rebuild are already done and per ticket pricing is not yet your dominant cost. We tell contractors this regularly, and the correct investment at that size is field discipline rather than software.
What is the difference between screening and dispatch?
Screening decides whether your client owns anything inside the dig polygon and therefore whether a field visit is needed at all. Dispatch decides which locator goes, in what order, against which deadline. Screening protects your margin because it removes visits. Dispatch protects your compliance because it protects the clock. Operations that optimise dispatch without fixing screening simply move the wrong visits faster.
How much does supporting an extra one call centre add?
Each centre is real integration work rather than a setting, because the ticket format, the transmission mechanism and the positive response method all differ, and some centres still use file drops with fixed width layouts. Ask any developer to name the centres they have handled rather than accept a general claim about integrations. Budget each new centre separately in your phase plan.
Can better evidence reduce chargebacks from clients?
It usually does, because most chargebacks are settled on records rather than on facts. Structured field records with position, marked facility types, area extent, offsets to permanent references and explicit negative findings turn an argument into a document. The second benefit is commercial: the same records feed quality scorecards you can put in front of a client at a quarterly review rather than after a damage.
What happens to evidence when a locator leaves the company?
With photographs on personal phones, it leaves with them, and that is the most common evidence failure in this sector. Every capture should bind to the ticket at the moment it is taken, carry position and original capture time, and be immutable afterwards inside a system your company owns. Producing a claim package should then be one action rather than a week of asking people to search camera rolls.
Should we build the client portal before or after quality auditing?
After. A portal shows clients what you did. Quality auditing tells you what you did, and you want to know before they do. Build sampling against each client's agreed rate first, run a quarter, then expose the results through a portal alongside live ticket status. Opening a portal onto data you have not yet audited yourself is a fast route to an uncomfortable quarterly review.
How many people should be working on my software project?
Three to five for a typical focused build: a project lead, one or two engineers, a designer, and part-time QA, which is the standard shape across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects. Larger platforms justify 6 to 10, but a ten-person team on a small first version usually signals bill padding rather than horsepower. What predicts success is whether a senior engineer is writing your code daily, not the headcount on the proposal.
Who owns the code when an agency builds my software?
You should, completely, through a written intellectual property assignment that transfers everything on final payment; without that clause, copyright stays with whoever wrote the code by default. Insist that the repository lives in your own GitHub organization from day one and that hosting, domains, and third-party accounts are registered to you. Also check for licenses to the agency's proprietary frameworks buried in the contract, because those can make switching vendors practically impossible even when you own your own code.
Can I build my product on a no-code tool like Bubble instead of hiring developers?
For testing whether anyone wants the product, yes, and Bubble's paid plans start at $29 a month, which is the cheapest validation you will ever buy. The ceiling arrives with complex data relationships, heavy integrations, performance at a few thousand users, and the fact that you cannot export a Bubble app to servers you control. A path many Digital Heroes clients take: prove demand on no-code, then rebuild custom once revenue justifies it, treating the no-code version as a paid prototype rather than a foundation.
Can custom software connect to the tools we already use, like QuickBooks, Stripe, and Google Workspace?
Yes, and connecting your existing tools is one of the main reasons to build custom: mainstream platforms like QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and Google Workspace all publish documented APIs. Budget 1 to 3 weeks of work per integration depending on API quality and how much data flows in both directions. Ask any vendor whether they have integrated with your specific tools before, because quirks like QuickBooks' OAuth token handling and API rate limits get learned on someone's project, and it should not be yours.
We're outgrowing Jobber. Should we move up to ServiceTitan or build our own?
Move to ServiceTitan if the problem is missing features on a standard residential trades workflow, because migrating between products is far cheaper than building. Build custom when the problem is fit: multi-day commercial jobs, subcontractor crews, or pricing rules that neither Jobber's Grow plan (about $199 per month billed annually, up to 15 users) nor ServiceTitan models cleanly. In Digital Heroes scoping calls, about half the teams asking this question turn out to need an integration or add-on rather than a new platform, so name the exact workflow gap before committing either way.
How does custom field service software work when technicians have no cell signal?
Properly built field software stores the technician's entire day on the device, including job details, forms, photos, signatures, and parts, then syncs automatically when signal returns. The hard engineering is conflict resolution: deciding what happens when a dispatcher reassigns a job while the technician is working it offline. That logic has to be designed before the build starts, because retrofitting offline into an app that assumed a connection is close to a rewrite.
How big a team does it take to build field service management software?
The standard Digital Heroes team for a field service build is five to six people: a project lead, a designer, two or three developers split across the mobile app and backend, and a QA tester who works on real devices in real signal conditions. Bigger is not better; experience with offline sync is. The riskier pattern is the opposite, a single developer quoting the entire system alone.
Can a custom field service app sync with QuickBooks and the payment processor we already use?
Yes, and it should be scoped as a named workstream rather than a finishing task. QuickBooks Online, Xero, Stripe, and Square all offer mature APIs, and a two-way invoice and payment sync typically adds $8,000 to $20,000 to a build depending on how items, taxes, and customers map. The decision that matters most is source of truth: agree which system owns customer records and pricing before development starts, or you will reconcile duplicates forever.
We run everything on spreadsheets and Airtable. How do we know it's time for custom software?
The reliable signals are re-typing the same data into multiple tools, one employee acting as human middleware between systems, and errors appearing in handoffs between teams. Hard limits force the issue too: Airtable's Team plan caps at 50,000 records per base, and Business costs $45 per seat per month, so a 20-person team pays about $10,800 a year for a tool it has already outgrown. When workarounds consume more hours than the tools save, the spreadsheet era is over.
Who can build a custom field service management software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom field service management software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other field service management software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
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