Industries (trades)

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What are industries?

An industry is the trade a service belongs to. ProBase ships with a large, ready-made list of trades — Pool & Spa Service, Lawn Care, Landscaping, Pest Control, House Cleaning, Pressure Washing, HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Roofing, and many more. You pick from this list (you can’t invent your own), and you don’t have to use all of them — most businesses only ever touch the one or two trades they actually work in. Tagging your services by trade lets ProBase tailor the experience to the work you do:

• Trade-specific fields at job completion — a Pool job asks for chemical readings and adjustments, while every other trade keeps a simpler, observations-only completion. ProBase shows the right fields for the right work instead of one generic form for everyone. (Pool is the only trade with its own completion fields today; the rest use the standard completion.)
• An organized catalog — your service list shows a small colored chip for each service’s trade, and you can filter the list down to a single trade with one tap.
• At-a-glance context on jobs — overdue jobs, job cards, and the job detail page show the trade so you know what kind of work each visit is before you arrive.

Tagging is always optional. A service with no industry works exactly as it always has, and you can add or change a service’s trade at any time.

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Choosing your trades during onboarding

When trades are enabled, the first work question in the onboarding wizard asks “What services do you offer?” under a YOUR SERVICES heading, with the note “Choose all that apply. We’ll use this to set up your standard line items and schedule formats.” Pick all that apply — this is a multi-select, so you can choose more than one. To keep onboarding quick, this step only offers the two most common trades — Pool and Lawn — and the ones you pick set up your starter catalog. The rest of the trades are available later from your Business Profile (see Managing your trades later). The trades you pick are saved to your business and used to pre-fill a starter catalog of services for those trades, so you finish onboarding ready to book work.

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If you don’t do Pool or Lawn

Below the Pool and Lawn cards there’s an Other card for businesses that don’t fit either trade. Tapping Other is a deliberate “none of these” choice — it lets you move on with Continue (no need to Skip), declares no trade, and seeds no starter catalog. You’ll finish onboarding on a simpler “You’re all set” screen with no service summary, ready to build your own catalog from scratch. This whole step is optional. Tap Skip to move on without declaring anything — slightly different from Other, which records that none of the offered trades apply. Either way, you can always add trades later from your Business Profile.

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Managing your trades later

You don’t have to decide everything during onboarding. Go to Settings in the sidebar (under BUSINESS) and find the Manage Industries card to add or remove trades at any time. Unlike onboarding’s short Pool/Lawn list, the Add a trade picker here offers the full catalog of trades ProBase supports, so this is where you’d declare something like Pest Control, Pressure Washing, or HVAC.

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Adding a trade

1. Open the Add a trade picker and choose a trade.
2. Confirm in the card that appears. Adding a trade simply unlocks it — you’ll be able to tag services with it and get trade-specific fields at job completion. Nothing changes until you tag a service, and no existing services or jobs are affected.
3. The trade now appears under Your industries, with a count of how many of your services use it.

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Removing a trade

Removing a trade is handled from the same Your industries list — tap the trash icon next to a trade. ProBase always confirms first and tells you exactly what will happen.

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Tagging a service with a trade

Each service in your service catalog can carry one industry. The Industry field sits just below the service name on both the create and edit forms. It’s optional and single-select — you choose from the trades your business has set up (the ones you declared during onboarding or added from your Business Profile), and each option shows how many of your services already use that trade.

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Suggested trades while you type

When you name a new service, ProBase watches for trade keywords and suggests a matching industry. Type “Weekly Pool Cleaning” and a prompt appears: “Assign the Pool industry?” Tap Assign Pool to fill in the field for you, or Not now to dismiss it. The suggestion is just a shortcut — you’re always free to pick a different trade, leave the field blank, or ignore the prompt entirely.

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Choosing a trade when creating a job

You can also set a job’s trade right when you book the work. An Industry field appears alongside the service name in the job creation wizard, in the quick “new service” form on a property, and in the Change Schedule editor — so the trade is captured up front instead of only on the catalog.

• Pick a service from your catalog and the trade fills in for you. If the catalog service is already tagged, that trade carries over to the job automatically. Choose Custom instead and the field clears so you can set the trade yourself.
• The field only shows when you have more than one trade. If you do a single trade, ProBase tags every new job with it automatically and keeps the field hidden — there’s nothing to choose. Teams with two or more trades see the picker.
• It’s still optional. Leave it blank if a job doesn’t fit a trade, and change it later from Change Schedule on the job’s detail page.

Setting the trade here means the job shows its trade chip and asks for the right completion fields from the very first visit — even for a custom-named job that ProBase couldn’t have guessed the trade from.

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Seeing trades across ProBase

Once your services are tagged, the trade shows up wherever it’s useful.

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On your service catalog

Your My services list shows a colored chip for each service’s trade. Above the list, filter pills let you narrow the catalog to a single trade — each pill shows how many services it covers. Tap a pill to show only that trade’s services. To return to the full catalog, tap the highlighted pill again or tap the All pill. A service’s detail page also shows its trade.

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On your jobs

The trade for a job is shown as a chip on the overdue jobs list and on the job detail page, so you can tell at a glance what kind of work each visit is.

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Trade-specific fields at job completion

The biggest payoff of tagging your work is at job completion. The completion form adapts to the job’s trade.

• Pool jobs show the full set of pool fields — Chemical Readings, Chemical Adjustments, and Observations.
• Other trades (and jobs with no trade) show a simpler completion with Observations only — the chemical-reading sections stay out of the way for work that doesn’t need them.

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A nudge to set a trade at completion

If you’re completing a job whose service doesn’t have a trade yet, ProBase shows a gentle prompt — “Set an industry for this service” — so you can tag it on the spot and unlock the right fields. Tap Set industry, choose the trade, and the completion form updates to show that trade’s fields. You can dismiss the prompt if you’d rather not tag the service — it won’t get in your way, and it won’t keep reappearing on every visit.

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Next steps

• Manage your service catalog and tag your services by trade
• Complete a job and capture trade-specific service records
• Business Profile settings — add or remove trades from the Manage Industries card