How Large Contractors Can Build a Single Source of Truth

Rapid growth through local acquisitions and market expansion defines successful home service franchises. Yet, this very expansion can become a challenge when reporting workflows fail to keep pace. What once sufficed for a single office crumbles under the strain of disparate teams, incompatible software, and fragmented, inconsistent data.

For multi-location operations, establishing a single source of truth is critical. However, achieving this is more complex than simply implementing a BI tool or relying on spreadsheets. This blog post examines the challenges multi-location contractors face in reporting and offers solutions for unifying their operational, financial, and marketing data.

Key takeaways

• Multi-location home service businesses need a single source of truth to scale operations with data-driven insights.

• Spreadsheets and manual reporting can’t keep up with growing complexity.

• Zapier + BI tool setups are too limited for the operational complexity of a large home service franchise.

• Peaka offers a zero-ETL, zero-copy data integration that unifies data from different sources without requiring a data warehouse or a dedicated data team.

The visibility challenge in multi-location businesses

Contractors with 50–500 employees often operate across multiple regions, service categories, and technician teams. Each branch needs to adapt to the local conditions, which brings about differences in dispatch practices, sales motions, marketing campaigns, and even ServiceTitan configurations.

This creates headaches for anyone trying to understand performance at a company-wide level:

• Which branches are profitable?

• Where are we losing money on jobs?

• How does marketing ROI compare across markets?

• Which teams are exceeding expectations, and which need help?

Without centralized reporting, every department works with its own view of the truth. Finance relies on Sage Intacct or QuickBooks. Operational data lives in ServiceTitan. Only marketing has visibility into the ROI from the Google Ads campaigns being run. All this data is presented to the leadership in a weekly Excel sheet that’s already outdated by the time it hits their inbox.

Why a “single source of truth” changes the game

A true single source of truth means every team (ops, finance, marketing, leadership, and even private equity stakeholders) works from the same set of live metrics. It ensures that the data is accurate and consistent across all systems. A single source of truth enables users to get real-time answers to questions like:

• Technician revenue per hour, ranked across all locations

• Job costing and gross margin across service categories

• Marketing performance by region

• Close rates by call type, location, and sales rep

• Backlog by branch and time-to-completion

This kind of clarity results in better decisions, faster course correction, and stronger growth. It’s the kind of data that drives operational agility.

What’s holding these companies back?

Despite the obvious need, most multi-location service businesses struggle to get there. Here’s why:

• Spreadsheets don’t scale: They’re great for one branch, not ten. Manual data aggregation is slow, error-prone, and poses security risks.

• ServiceTitan’s native reporting is limited: ServiceTitan may be the operational backbone of a home service franchise, but it is not designed for cross-location or financial visibility.

• Zapier + BI tools are brittle: The Zapier + BI tool formula is good for moving data from one tool to another, but it comes up short when reporting needs become more complex in a dynamic environment.

• Outsourced dashboards are slow and expensive: Waiting weeks for a consultant to update a report just doesn’t cut it in a fast-moving operation.

Most companies in this range don’t have a data team. They are stuck in a data no man’s land: They know that they need to replace spreadsheets, but neither can they afford nor do they need platforms like Snowflake and Databricks. What large contractors need is fast, flexible reporting that doesn’t rely on engineers or expensive vendors.

What the ideal solution looks like

To build a real single source of truth, your reporting setup needs to check several boxes:

• Integrate data from operational software, accounting systems (e.g., ServiceTitan + Sage Intacct or QuickBooks), and marketing tools (Google Ads)

• Unify metrics across branches even when ServiceTitan setups vary

• Automate dashboard updates—no more manual exports

• Give business users control so your dispatcher, finance lead, or marketing team can explore the data themselves

• Support both high-level overviews and deep dives for leadership, branch managers, and analysts alike

In short: You need a flexible data platform capable of forming a unified data layer from disparate data sources without requiring a Snowflake or engineering team to manage it.

How Peaka makes it possible

Peaka was built for growth-focused service companies that are outgrowing spreadsheets but don’t want to hire a data team. Here’s how it solves the single source of truth problem:

• Zero-ETL, zero-copy integrations: Connects directly to ServiceTitan, accounting, and marketing systems without any ETL pipelines or having to move or duplicate data.

• Standardized metrics and KPIs: Translates messy, inconsistent data into consistent metrics and KPIs that make sense across all branches.

• BI tool flexibility: Allows teams to send their consolidated data to any BI tool for instant visualization without any IT involvement.

• Real-time visibility: Peaka enables you to integrate data from different ServiceTitan accounts. As a result, you can list invoice data, monitor call data, track job profitability, close rates, and more across multiple locations.

Whether you’re a $5M regional operator or a $50M franchise scaling fast, Peaka helps you get the same reports you’d get with Snowflake and Databricks, without the massive initial investment, astronomical monthly bills, and engineering complexity.

A real-world example: 5 locations, one unified view

Let’s say you run a $20M HVAC and plumbing company with five locations. Your ops team spends hours each week exporting ServiceTitan data to prep weekly reports.

With Peaka:

• You no longer have to update your dashboards manually as Peaka supports integration with ServiceTitan and BI tools, simplifying how you can send your ServiceTitan data to Power BI and Looker Studio.

• Dashboards update automatically without any CSV exports or spreadsheet wrangling

• Your CFO can integrate ServiceTitan and Sage Intacct data in real-time and make better decisions

• Your COO can track technician data and job profitability by region

• Your marketing team measures ROI across locations in real-time

No more digging through disconnected reports or waiting for dashboard updates from a consultant. Everyone on your team gets the answers they need when they need them.

Conclusion: Centralized data for decentralized teams

If your team is tired of manual data exports to build dashboards, it might be time to modernize your data stack (preferably without having to invest in an outrageously costly “modern data stack”).

Peaka allows you to integrate ServiceTitan with your accounting software, marketing tools, and other legacy systems. It centralizes all your data with ready-made connectors without copying and moving your data into a data warehouse, eliminating the need for a data team to maintain ETL pipelines.

Purpose-built for the data needs of home service businesses, Peaka is the data stack a contractor will ever need.

Book a demo to see how Peaka helps home service franchises build a single source of truth out of scattered data.