IT support for contractors in the Lower Mainland: what keeps crews working

If you run a plumbing, HVAC, electrical or construction company with 5 to 25 people, most of the work happens in trucks and on job sites, and the office is often one dispatcher and a router nobody has touched in years. Good IT support for contractors in the Lower Mainland is mostly about keeping that setup running on the bad days, like when a phone gets left on a tailgate or a tech quits.

Phones and tablets are the field office

Your techs use their phones to see the day’s jobs, take photos, collect signatures and send invoices. That phone has customer addresses, gate codes and a signed-in company email account on it. If one goes missing on a site in Langley or Abbotsford, someone at the office should be able to lock it and clear the company data before a stranger opens it.

That’s the job of mobile device management, or MDM. MDM keeps a list of every phone and tablet with company email or apps on it, makes sure each one has a passcode, and lets you erase it from a web page if it’s lost. Microsoft’s version is called Intune, and Microsoft says Intune Plan 1 is included in Microsoft 365 Business Premium. On a company-owned phone you can wipe the whole device. If a tech uses their own phone, Intune can remove only the company data from the work apps, so their family photos stay put.

Field service software and the shared login

ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro and Procore hold a lot of the business now: customer history, quotes, job photos, invoices, and often the payments you take in the field. The weak spot in many smaller shops is one login shared by the whole crew, with the password on a note in the truck. It saves a user licence, but a tech who leaves on bad terms still knows the password, and when an invoice changes you can’t tell who changed it.

Give each person their own login and turn on two-step sign-in (MFA) wherever the app offers it. Keep a short list of what each person can get into, so their last day goes by the list: the field app, email, supplier portals and the shared drive. Our plumbing and HVAC page shows how we set this up.

An office number that rings the crew

If your main number only rings a desk phone and nobody is in, the call goes to voicemail and the customer may try the next contractor. A VoIP phone system (phone service over the internet) can ring the dispatcher first and then the on-call tech’s cell after hours. The tech answers in an app, and when they call back, the customer sees your business number instead of the tech’s personal one. When someone leaves, you take the line off their phone. Our VoIP phone systems page has the details.

Backup internet for the dispatch office

When the office internet goes down, dispatch loses the job board, and the desk phones go quiet unless calls are set to forward to cells. An LTE failover router has a SIM card in it, like a phone, and switches to the cell network on its own when the main line drops. For a dispatch office in Coquitlam or Burnaby, that means the router plus a small data plan, and it keeps the phones and the job board up until your provider fixes the line.

Invoice fraud aimed at contractors

Contractors move a lot of money by e-transfer and wire, and that’s what this scam goes after. Someone gets into a supplier’s email, or sets up an address that looks almost the same, and sends a normal-looking note saying their banking details have changed. The next payment goes to the fraudster. It can run the other way too, when someone gets into your email and tells a general contractor in Surrey to send your payment to a “new” account. The RCMP describes this scheme on its business email compromise page and advises confirming payment requests by phone instead of relying on email alone.

Call the supplier at a number you had before the email arrived, and have two people sign off on any change to banking details. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security recommends MFA on every staff and admin email account. If money has already gone out, it says to contact your bank right away and report it to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

DMARC, a setting on your email domain, makes it harder for someone to send fake invoices from your exact address. When we checked the public DNS records of 3,392 Lower Mainland businesses in September 2026, about 81% had no DMARC protection being enforced.

Backups of the job files and the books

If your office runs QuickBooks Desktop or Sage 50 on one PC, with drawings and job photos in folders next to it, a backup that only goes to a USB drive plugged into that same computer can be lost along with it. Keep a copy off-site or in the cloud, and every few months restore the accounting file to a different computer and open it, so you know the backup works. Our construction contractors page covers how we organize and back up drawings and subcontractor paperwork.

A checklist for this week

1. List every phone and tablet with company email or your field app, and check that you can lock and erase each one remotely.
2. Replace any shared field-app login with one login per person, and turn on MFA.
3. Write down the accounts a tech needs removed on their last day.
4. Call your main number from your cell after hours and see where it goes.
5. On a quiet afternoon, unplug the office internet for five minutes and note what stops working.
6. Put a rule in writing that banking changes get confirmed by phone and approved by two people.
7. Restore your QuickBooks or Sage file from backup to another computer and open it.

Getting IT support for contractors in the Lower Mainland

Umbrella IT was founded in Burnaby in 2013 and works with businesses across Metro Vancouver and the Lower Mainland. We start with a conversation about how your crews and office run before we look at any computers, we’re month-to-month with no onboarding fee, and we test backups by restoring real data on a schedule.

Common questions

Do I need MDM if my techs use their own phones?

If their phone has your email or field app on it, yes. When they move on, Intune can remove only the company data, and their photos and texts stay on the phone.

How do I know if our backups work?

Restore a file to another computer and open it. If nobody has done that in the last few months, you don’t know yet.

If you’d like a second set of eyes on your phones, logins and backups, book a free IT assessment and we’ll tell you what we’d fix first.