ServiceM8 15: everything announced at the 2026 launch

Quick answer: ServiceM8 15 was announced at the ServiceM8 Launch on 18 September 2026. The headline items are Office Agent, an AI assistant online and by voice in the app, a rebuilt booking window with a single new schedule, Pricing Strategies for materials, Private Add-ons you build by describing them to ChatGPT, and a full ServiceM8 for Android app that replaces Lite. In Australia, ServiceM8 Pay drops to 1.19% + 30c from 1 October 2026, the day card surcharging switches off. This post is written from the launch livestream, so details will shift as features roll out.

Jump straight to a part of the launch:

• Everyday job card improvements (08:17)
• Diary replies, Staff Chat, notifications and Toolbox Meeting (08:57)
• ServiceM8 Phone and Voice Agent (13:26)
• Imagine and Photo Markup (15:10)
• Materials, supplier price lists and Pricing Strategies (16:39)
• Booking window and the new schedule (21:30)
• iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch (27:46)
• ServiceM8 Pay for Australia (32:07)
• Private Add-ons built with ChatGPT (33:44)
• AI agents and ServiceM8 inside ChatGPT (35:49)
• Office Agent (36:46)
• ServiceM8 for Android (44:02)
• How to activate ServiceM8 15 (46:26)

What’s in ServiceM8 15 at a glance

What changed on the everyday job card?

Job notes expand as you type. Completed tasks can be hidden on the job card and in the task list. Client card job history looks better, and a preview button opens a quote or invoice in one click. You can search recurring jobs by service address or category, and duplicate a form template rather than rebuild one.

What’s new in team communication?

From the new Staff Profile page you take a selfie and ServiceM8 builds a custom avatar in its own style, replacing the generic staff icons.

The bigger change is the job diary, where acknowledging a note used to mean writing another note and hoping the context held. You can now reply directly to any diary note, online or in the app. Whoever wrote it is notified, and everyone in the thread follows the rest. If a reply is overkill, react with an emoji.

Staff messaging has been rebuilt as Staff Chat, with images and files in direct messages and, more usefully, channels: public ones for the business, a team or a project, private ones for management or finance, all open in the app as well as online. Through the website and email add-on you can authorise ServiceM8 to send from a domain you already own, so quotes and invoices carry your identity. Notifications were overhauled in the app and online, with filters for all, unread and mentions, and a page holding a year of history. And Toolbox Meeting, inside Knowledge, records a pre-start, transcribes it and saves a summary with the audio kept.

What’s new in ServiceM8 Phone and the Voice Agent?

ServiceM8 Phone got better call connection, transfers and call quality. Voice Agent, the AI receptionist launched last year, got the bigger upgrade. Setup now runs on simple policy controls for common scenarios, the models behind it are faster, and it handles conversational pauses much better: it answers sooner when a caller finishes, waits when they trail off, and stops treating a “yep” as an interruption. We cover setup on our ServiceM8 Phone Voice Agent setup page.

There is also call blocking. Block a number from the call details and future calls are rejected before any staff device rings, with no inbox item, notification or voicemail. If unanswered calls are a running problem, we’ve written on why tradies lose jobs to missed calls.

Imagine and Photo Markup

Imagine, the AI photo tool released online last year, is now in the app. Open a job diary photo, describe the change, and it generates a version showing the finished job. Add a reference photo to steer the style, or draw over the original to show where something goes. It is most useful in proposals: add a photo of the current situation, open Imagine, and the new version drops back into the proposal, so a customer sees the finished job instead of imagining it.

Photo Markup also comes online: from any job photo on the dispatch board, draw lines, arrows, shapes and labels, and saving adds the marked-up image to the diary while the original stays.

What changed with materials and pricing?

This is the largest group of changes in the release, covered in full in our guide to Pricing Strategies and the materials updates.

In the field, point the job camera at a barcode and ServiceM8 shows the matching material, price and stock. Materials management in the app now covers the whole database, so you can search, update and edit bundles, and a bundle can carry an image that shows on a proposal. In the office, material history lists every material added, changed or removed, and whether a person or an integration did it. Supplier invoice importing now handles supplier quotes too.

Then pricing. Supplier price list importing is easier to configure and now sits inside materials. On top of it, Pricing Strategies systemise how a cost price becomes a sale price. A fixed markup applies one percentage to everything. A tiered markup applies more at low cost levels and less at high ones, such as 100% below $50, 60% from $50 and 35% from $200. Apply a strategy during an import, against a single item, as the default for new materials, or in bulk. List views across materials, jobs, clients and bundles were also rebuilt with your own columns and sorting, and a new preference keeps job and proposal templates current when prices change.

What this means for your business. Most trade businesses we set up have a materials list that was accurate the day it was imported and has drifted ever since, because nobody wants to reprice 900 items by hand. This is the first version of that job a busy business can maintain. Build two or three strategies, not twenty.

The rebuilt booking window and the new schedule

Booking changed the most, and we’ve written it up in full in our guide to the new booking window and schedule.

The old window suggested times but showed very little of the schedule, so when they didn’t suit you were stuck. The new one shows a whole week. White is available, grey is not, green blocks are ServiceM8’s suggestions. Take a suggestion and you’re booked, with the staff member chosen for you. Pick a person instead and you see their real week, including travel time. The calendar itself is the input, so click an empty space to place a booking, drag it, or resize it to change the duration. Book over another job or outside hours and ServiceM8 warns you, then lets you save anyway.

It also does the awkward maths: require a whole crew, or any one of three staff, and the available times narrow to match. Multi-day installs can run across non-consecutive days. Customer availability comes from presets like mornings or after three, or is read out of the job notes, so “Tuesdays and Thursdays after two” applies itself. Or send the customer a booking link and let them pick.

The separate calendar and staff schedule are now one schedule. Day, week and month still look familiar, with new options: choose what shows on each booking card, control which staff appear, hide weekends, and see next week’s weather. New staff column views cover a day, three days and a week, and new row views show remaining capacity. Right-click a booking to move it to tomorrow or convert it to a business hours allocation. Undo and redo are in, and the “are you sure” popups are out.

What this means for your business. If you dispatch more than about three people, the booking window is where your office time goes. Its suggestions are only as good as your business hours, travel time and staff skills, so set those up first.

What’s new on iPhone and iPad?

The app picked up jobs you previously went online for: forwarding an email from the job diary, attaching a file from Files or iCloud, searching your forms, and filling a form all at once instead of question by question. RoomScan now captures wall colour. You can also add a second ServiceM8 account from the new profile screen and switch without signing out. There is a rebuilt Apple Watch app too, which no longer needs your iPhone nearby: it shows your current job, clocks you on and off, and records a voice note transcribed into the diary.

iPad got the most attention. The new schedule is there, with tap and hold to create a booking, drag to change duration, and undo. Much of the dispatch board came across too, so you can drag a job from the jobs panel onto the right person and time, show your queues across the top, and move jobs between them. Open a job and the details and diary sit side by side.

ServiceM8 Pay: what changes in Australia on 1 October

Two things happen on 1 October 2026. Australian businesses can no longer surcharge card payments, and ServiceM8 disables Australian card surcharging on your account automatically. On the same date ServiceM8 Pay rates drop across every Australian plan, to a starting rate of 1.19% + 30c per transaction, following a reduction in what the card networks charge.

ServiceM8 added two tools for it. You can set a threshold above which card payments are hidden on an invoice, since the fee matters more on a $9,000 invoice than a $300 one. A price change wizard also lifts item prices by a blanket percentage. We cover the ban itself in our guide to the card surcharge ban for tradies.

Private Add-ons built with ChatGPT

Over the past year ServiceM8 opened much more of its data and workflows to add-ons, including add-ons that run entirely on ServiceM8’s infrastructure. The new part is how you build one: open ChatGPT, give it ServiceM8’s development toolkit, follow the setup steps, then describe what you want, and ChatGPT builds and deploys a Private Add-on into your account. The launch demonstrated two: one assigning every new job to the same staff member and allocation window, one storing job checklists per job type. There is no developer account or public listing, and you can disable them from your add-ons area. We go deeper in our guide to Private Add-ons.

What we’re building with it

Web Blend is building a ServiceM8 add-on of our own, in development as of September 2026 with no launch date. It feeds Google Ads spend and lead source data into ServiceM8 and produces a monthly dashboard: what was spent, how many leads came in, how many became quotes, how many became paying customers, and whether the month made a profit after costs like staff and materials. For what we do today, see ServiceM8 Google Ads conversion tracking.

AI agents, booking, and ServiceM8 inside ChatGPT

Customers find trades through search engines today, but increasingly an AI agent will do the looking and the booking. If you use a ServiceM8 hosted website or online booking page, ServiceM8 now presents your business in a way those tools understand, so an agent can read your services, answer the questions on your booking form and submit the booking. If your site isn’t hosted by ServiceM8, you solve that yourself. It is what WebMCP is about, and our free agent ready check scores a site on how well an AI agent can read and act on it.

Going the other way, ServiceM8 works better inside supported AI tools such as ChatGPT. Ask for jobs that need attention and you get an interactive job list in the conversation, and it can prepare an email, change a job status, queue work or add a diary note in your account.

Office Agent

Office Agent was previewed last year and is now available to all customers. Read our full guide to Office Agent for the detail.

Online it opens beside your work and already knows which job you’re looking at. Ask what happened on a job and whether it is ready to invoice, and it reads the diary history and answers. It can also report on the quotes still waiting on a response, or the customers who owe the most. Ask for a quote or invoice draft and it uses job data, recorded time, the diary and Knowledge to prepare the line items. Suggested actions wait there for you to approve or decline.

In the app you talk to it instead. The launch demo ran a whole job by voice: a summary of the fault, a diary note about a failed pump, a staff availability check, a booking the next morning and an SMS to the customer.

The third mode is recurring tasks. Type the task in plain words, such as reviewing the action required list every weekday at 8:30 and preparing the next action where the evidence is clear. Office Agent runs it in the background and leaves the prepared actions on the jobs. Decline one and explain why, and it stores that as a task memory for next run. For rules that apply everywhere, write them into Knowledge, which Office Agent can search and follow. Every plan includes a daily usage allowance, and a monthly fee unlocks scheduled tasks and higher limits, though the fee was not stated at the launch.

What this means for your business. The value depends on how tidy your ServiceM8 data is. An agent reading half-finished diary notes and an empty Knowledge section will produce confident nonsense. Document your most repeated procedures first, then run one recurring task and review what it prepares for a fortnight.

ServiceM8 for Android replaces Lite

Android got the closing announcement, and the list is long: note editing, favourite job actions, video capture, photo markup, document and barcode scanning, the client list with job history, calendar and map views with route optimisation, job lists and queues, better forms, staff messaging, the activity feed, asset scanning, Knowledge, proposals, deposits, payments including tap to pay, and inbox management.

Then ServiceM8 removed the Lite badge. The app is now ServiceM8 for Android, and it gets the new ServiceM8 15 features as well: Office Agent, the new schedule, diary threads, note reactions and the new notifications. ServiceM8 called it its biggest Android upgrade yet. Our write-up is at ServiceM8 for Android.

What this means for your business. This removes the oldest objection to ServiceM8. When people compared ServiceM8 and Tradify on Reddit, the cut-down Android app was the standard reason to look elsewhere, and that post’s caveat is now out of date. If half your crew is on Android, look again.

How do you turn ServiceM8 15 on?

Two steps, because the apps and the online dashboard are separate.

1. Apps. The ServiceM8 15 apps for iOS and Android are in their app stores from 18 September 2026.
2. Online. Head to the launch page on servicem8.com and click the activation link. That reveals an option in your Settings menu to activate ServiceM8 15.

On timing: activate it when you can spend twenty minutes with the office, not at 7am on a Monday. The schedule and booking window look different enough that whoever dispatches your work needs a run through first.

Where to get help with it

If you would rather have this set up properly than work through it yourself, Web Blend is a ServiceM8 Bronze Partner and handles ServiceM8 setup, training and automation for Australian trade businesses.