How Trades Businesses Can Track KPIs without a Data Team

Home service businesses would like to make data-driven decisions as much as any other business. But when it comes to turning ServiceTitan data into business intelligence, most home service companies run into the same problem: Data tools are built for companies with data engineers and analytics teams, which HVAC, plumbing, and roofing cannot afford.

Instead, they end up with a choice between outdated spreadsheets or expensive consultants. Neither is scalable. Neither gives the team the control or visibility they need to grow.

It is time for a new playbook. Business intelligence without engineers is no longer a fantasy. With the right tools, it is achievable—and practical—for growing home service companies.

Key takeaways

• Home service teams fail to get value from BI tools: Due to the challenges of integrating ServiceTitan with BI tools, most BI initiatives in home service companies fail to deliver value.

• Spreadsheets and consultants are not scalable solutions for reporting: Manual reporting wastes time and money, while outsourced dashboards are expensive to update and lack flexibility.

• Peaka enables self-serve BI without a data team: Peaka offers seamless data integration between data sources and BI tools, helping home service businesses unify their data and track key metrics without engineering overhead.

Why home service businesses struggle with BI tools

As powerful as ServiceTitan is for managing jobs and operations, getting actionable, visual reporting out of it remains a pain. Its built-in reports are limited, and exporting data manually to build dashboards in Excel is time-consuming and error-prone. Most BI tools, meanwhile, are too complex to integrate with ServiceTitan directly—especially without technical help.

Business intelligence platforms like Power BI, Looker, or Tableau promise powerful insights. But for most contractors, BI projects rarely get off the ground.

Here is why:

• Data integration remains the biggest challenge, as BI tools can be too complex to integrate directly with ServiceTitan, especially without technical assistance.

• BI tools require some technical skill to set up and model data before building dashboards.

• Most teams do not have SQL skills or data analysts on staff.

• For the more capable but technical options like Tableau, the learning curve is steep, and the payoff takes too long.

• The more user-friendly options, like Looker Studio, come up short in the customization department.

Without a simple way to integrate and prep ServiceTitan data, these tools sit unused or create more confusion than they solve

The risks of spreadsheets and outsourced dashboards

To work around the BI gap, many companies fall back on Excel. However, spreadsheets require constant manual updates, are prone to human error, and quickly become outdated. Copying and pasting data from ServiceTitan each week just to calculate job costs, margins, or technician performance can become a full-time job.

Others try to escape this cycle by hiring consultants to build one-off dashboards. But these dashboards are often hard to update, rely on static data, and break as soon as the business changes.

Neither approach provides the real-time visibility into operational data that operators need to make fast, confident decisions.

What “BI without engineers” actually looks like

There is now a third option—lightweight, self-serve data platforms designed for non-technical teams. These platforms remove the heavy lifting around ServiceTitan reporting and make it easy to build live dashboards using your existing BI tools.

With this option, you can

• Connect your systems to any data source and pull in data

• Choose the metrics that matter most to your business

• Send your consolidated data to your BI tool of choice

• Get real-time updates as your dashboards will refresh automatically without any need for manual data exports

This gives ops, finance, and leadership teams the freedom to explore and act on their KPIs without relying on IT, analysts, or spreadsheets.

The new BI playbook for contractors

If you are running a $5M or $50M home service company, here is the new playbook for getting value from your ServiceTitan data:

Step 1: Connect your data sources Plug in your operational systems like ServiceTitan and your financial tools like QuickBooks or Sage Intacct.

Step 2: Define the metrics that matter Focus on the KPIs that drive your business—job cost, margin per job type, tech performance, and close rates.

Step 3: Push your data to a BI tool for visualization Turn your tabular data into visualizations by sending it directly to Looker Studio, Power BI, Metabase, Tableau, or some other tool.

Step 4: Share and act on insights Distribute dashboards across your team so everyone is aligned on what is working and what needs fixing.

How Peaka makes this possible

Peaka is purpose-built for home service businesses using ServiceTitan. It enables non-technical teams to unify their operational and financial data and send it to BI tools with zero engineering effort.

• It connects natively to ServiceTitan, QuickBooks, and Xero

• It includes a semantic layer so you can define business terms like “gross margin per job” without using code

• It is designed for operators, not engineers, and enables you to send your data to any BI tool using a no-code interface

• It makes data available to even the non-technical employees in an organization, empowering business units to make informed decisions

With Peaka, your team no longer has to wrestle with ServiceTitan exports or wait on custom dashboards. You get reliable, analysis-ready data where you already build reports: Your BI tool.

Conclusion: It's time for a purpose-built solution

Business intelligence should not require a data team or a six-figure budget. And it should not require hours of copying and pasting from ServiceTitan every week.

Home service operators need visibility, and now Peaka gives them a faster way to unify their data, track critical KPIs, and scale reporting—all without hiring engineers or building a custom data stack.

The new playbook is simple:

Connect your data. Track the metrics that matter. Build dashboards you can actually use.

And grow with confidence.

Ready to power your dashboards without hiring a data team?

Sign up to Peaka for free today.

Book a demo to see how Peaka empowers non-technical teams with real-time reporting.