Written by the EasyDone team. Last checked 10 October 2026.
Uptick is the sharper tool for the inspection itself: asset lists, barcode scans, defect quotes and a customer portal, all built for fire. EasyDone is the better fit when half your fire business is installs, stock and admin, because it runs the upgrade projects and purchase orders too, and its Assistant does the quoting and chasing when you ask. Where Uptick is ahead, a fire asset register out of the box, we build one for your business.
That's our view, and we make EasyDone, so here's the evidence area by area. We'll use a made up Perth fire business as the example. Its owner, Justin Lyons, has a tech, Anna, scanning sixty extinguishers in a Northbridge apartment car park, while upstairs the strata manager wants the hydrant booster upgrade quoted by Wednesday, the emergency lights are a separate job with a separate budget, and fire door hardware for a job in Rivervale is sitting in the Bayswater shed with nobody sure which job it was ordered for. The inspections run beautifully. Everything else is held together with spreadsheets and Justin's memory.
First, what Uptick does well
Uptick is built for fire protection, and it shows. Its Australian site is aimed squarely at fire inspection, testing and maintenance businesses, (Uptick Australia, read 10 October 2026) and its pricing page talks about more than a thousand fire protection businesses using it. (Uptick pricing, read 10 October 2026)
Its asset lists let a technician find the asset, record the inspection outcome, add defects and keep the barcode details, (Uptick asset lists, read 10 October 2026) which is exactly what Anna's doing in that car park. Its defect quotes have a proper approve-and-decline process with who authorised it and when. (Uptick Support, A guide to approving and declining a defect quote, read 10 October 2026) And its customer portal shows the building's property details, defects, routine activity and downloadable reports. (Uptick Support, A guide on the Uptick customer portal, read 10 October 2026)
Pricing is per user, counting office and field users, with customer and subcontractor logins free, billed monthly with no lock-in. It says most companies are up and running within two months. (Uptick pricing)
That's a proper specialist tool. No argument.
So what's the problem?
Fire businesses aren't just inspection businesses. Justin's isn't. About half his revenue is inspections. The other half is everything that comes out of them: hydrant and booster upgrades, emergency lighting replacements, fire door hardware, new installs on fit-outs, and the occasional sprinkler modification for a builder.
That half is project work, with stock, purchase orders, variations and progress claims. Uptick lists install projects and inventory management on its pricing page, (Uptick pricing) but in our view it's built around the inspection first and everything else second. When half your business is the "everything else", you feel it.
And then there's the admin. The quotes at 9 pm, the chasing, the booking, the "who owes us what". That's where Justin's evenings go.
The assistants, side by side
| What its AI does | Does it do your admin? | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptick | Its pricing page lists an AI Scheduler under office features. (Uptick pricing) We couldn't find a published description of what it does. | Help with the schedule. No assistant you can ask to do the admin. |
| EasyDone | The Assistant can do anything a screen in EasyDone can: quotes, bookings, invoices, purchase orders, chasing, moving jobs, even your settings, typed or spoken.6 | Yes. You ask, it does it, you OK the money and the sends. |
Here's Justin's Monday in EasyDone. Still in the van in Northbridge, he says: "Quote the strata manager for the hydrant booster upgrade at the Northbridge apartments, our usual rates, and add the emergency lighting replacement as a separate option." The Assistant finds the customer and the site, uses his saved rates and defaults, asks for anything it can't find, and shows him the quote before anything goes. Nothing reaches the strata manager until Justin says so.6
It works inside each person's permissions, too, so an apprentice can log his hours but can't go sending quotes to strata managers.6
Verdict: Uptick helps with the schedule. Ours does the admin.
Install projects: where the money is
The hydrant booster upgrade is a proper project: a won quote, a variation when the builder finds the old valve is seized, a backordered pump, a progress claim at the halfway mark.
In EasyDone, every won quote lands on the project as its own scope. The seized valve is a variation: a tagged scope with its own lines, its own labour budget and its own bar on the Gantt. Labour budget sits against the hours actually burned, scope by scope, while the job's running. Milestones tick off and progress claims go out numbered against the project, with retentions held and released as their own invoice.7
Verdict: Uptick lists install projects. EasyDone runs them like the main event, because for half of Justin's business, they are.
Stock: whose fire door hardware is that?
Remember the hardware in the Bayswater shed? In EasyDone, stock is one trail:7
- Items carry supplier buy prices and your margin, so the quote prices itself.
- Win it and the closers, hinges and signage flow onto the job as gear to order.
- Raise the purchase order from the job and see what it does to your margin before it goes.
- Receive it and it's reserved for the Rivervale job. Nobody wonders whose it is.
- Transfers to the vans and stocktakes keep their full history.
Verdict: the hardware in the shed has a job number on it, every time.
Defects: from "found it" to "fixed it"
This is where fire businesses make or lose money. Anna finds a corroded hose reel nozzle on level two. That's an observation. It isn't an approved repair, and it certainly isn't a fixed one. Three different states, and a good system never lets them blur.
Uptick handles the middle step well: its defect quotes go to the customer to approve or decline, with who authorised it and when recorded on the record. (Uptick Support, A guide to approving and declining a defect quote)
In EasyDone, the defect goes on the job as its own note and follow-up, with Anna's photo, separate from the routine visit, so the inspection closes off on time.7 Justin asks the Assistant to quote it, with options if there are any, and checks it before it goes.6 Unanswered quotes get an automatic follow-up, so a defect doesn't sit in limbo for a quarter.7 When the strata manager says yes, the won quote becomes the job, the part flows onto it as gear to order, and the repair is booked with its reason on it.7
Whichever system you use, run one test before you trust it: get someone who wasn't on site to open the record and say, in one sentence, whether the defect is found, approved or fixed. If they can't, the record isn't doing its job.
The phone app
Uptick's technician app is built around the inspection, on iPhone and Android. (Uptick pricing) It's good at it.
EasyDone's phone app covers the whole day: Today with the next job, access notes (the car park code, the building manager's mobile) and On my way with the customer text previewed. Time runs against the job, and notes, photos, serial numbers and parts go straight onto it. A required checklist can hold the visit open until every step and photo is there.7
Our one honest limit, and what we do about it
EasyDone doesn't come with a fire-specific asset register and routine inspection schedule out of the box. Uptick does, and for Anna's sixty extinguishers that matters.
What we do instead is build it for your business. In EasyDone that's Workshop: you describe the asset register and routines your inspection work needs, it gets planned, built and tested, and you review it before a single site moves across.8 Then the inspections, the defects, the quotes, the installs, the stock and the admin all live in one place, instead of two.
Service work is already there, too: callouts and warranty returns tracked to the end, with a status page the customer can check,7 and maintenance agreements with their renewals tracked.7
Everything, side by side
| Area | Uptick | EasyDone |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Fire inspection, testing and maintenance. (Uptick Australia) | Trade businesses, inspections and installs alike. |
| Asset inspections | Asset lists, outcomes, barcodes and defects. (Uptick asset lists) | Built for your routines by Workshop.8 |
| Defect to quote | Approve and decline with authorisation. (Uptick Support, A guide to approving and declining a defect quote) | Quotes with options; the Assistant drafts them when you ask.6 |
| AI | AI Scheduler listed. (Uptick pricing) | Does quotes, bookings, invoices and orders when you ask.6 |
| Install projects | Listed. (Uptick pricing) | Scopes, variations, Gantt, labour burn, claims, retentions.7 |
| Stock | Inventory management listed. (Uptick pricing) | One trail from quote to job to order to van.7 |
| Customer view | Portal with property, defects, routines and reports. (Uptick Support, A guide on the Uptick customer portal) | A status page for callouts and warranty jobs.7 |
| Pricing | Per office and field user, monthly. (Uptick pricing) | See the pricing page. |
The short version: Uptick is a sharp inspection tool. EasyDone runs the whole fire business, and does the admin for you.
How would Justin move without losing the history?
Slowly, and in the right order. Fire records matter.
- Agree what has to come across: asset identifiers, locations, the links between sites and assets, inspection history and the documents behind it.
- Test on one building first, with linked visits and open defects, and check that the history still means the same thing on the other side. Counts aren't enough.
- Run both until the checks pass, then move the rest site by site.
We plan the move and the timetable with you.9
The verdict
If your business is almost all routine inspections, Uptick's specialist inspection tools are hard to fault. If half of it is the upgrades, repairs and installs that come out of those inspections, you want one system that runs the projects, the stock and the admin as well, and that's EasyDone. For Justin's business, that means the booster quote out with the lighting as an option, the Rivervale hardware with a job number on it, and the progress claim waiting for one OK.
If half your fire business is installs and all your evenings are admin, book an EasyDone demo with your own building. Bring the inspection and the upgrade that came out of it. We'll show you both in one place.
