The BigWave User Manual

Start Here

1. Welcome What this manual covers, who each part is for, and the conventions used throughout.
2. Meet Beacon Electric The example company used in every chapter: an electrical contractor with commercial and residential customers.
3. Quick Start: Your First Work Order in 30 Minutes Create a customer, open a work order, assign a technician, complete the job, and send the invoice. The whole loop, once, fast.

Part 1

Understand BigWave

1. 1 What BigWave Is The core model: customers, sites, projects, and work orders, plus where partners, assets, and workflows fit.
2. 2 A Tour of the UI Logging in, the home page, the panel layout every screen shares, quick search, and your profile.
3. 3 Grids, Views, and Controls How BigWave's grids work everywhere: choosing columns, saving views, exporting, and the date controls.
4. 4 Who Does What in BigWave Access levels and roles: what internal users, technicians, customers, sites, and partners each see.

Part 2

Set Up Your Company

1. 5 Company Profile & Global Settings The Setup screen: company details, contacts, the holiday schedule, invoicing settings, and the global items that everything else inherits.
2. 6 Users, Technicians & Access Creating logins, setting up technicians, the technician record, and deactivating people cleanly.
3. 7 Statuses & Workflow Design Designing your status flow before you build it, status defaults, how status drives billing and automation, and workflow types.
4. 8 Customers & Sites Creating customers and sites, duplicate detection, combining true duplicates, regions, billing addresses, and contacts.
5. 9 Projects: Your Lines of Work Creating projects, the project setup screen panel by panel, work order templates, project teams, and the copy-from-project shortcut.
6. 10 Custom Fields & Tags Defining custom fields at every level, grouping them, importing definitions, and when a tag beats a field.
7. 11 Services, Rates & Materials Contracts and rates, the materials database, preferred materials, labor rates and time categories, and accounting codes.
8. 12 Document & Email Templates Word-based document templates with merge fields, document folders, deliverables, and HTML email templates.
9. 13 Alerts & Notifications Project alerts: every trigger type, choosing recipients, overdue timers, and emailed status action buttons.
10. 14 Customer & Partner Portals What customer, site, and partner logins see, how to set portal access up, and deciding who gets one.

Part 3

Run Your Operation

1. 15 The Life of a Work Order Creating work orders every way, the work order screen panel by panel, and statuses in daily practice.
2. 16 Scheduling & Dispatch Schedule entries, assigning technicians, the resource calendar, scheduled events, and a dispatcher's day.
3. 17 Technicians in the Field A technician's BigWave: My Assignments, capturing photos and comments on site, time and materials entry, and timecards.
4. 18 Quoting & Estimating Building quotes from line items, emailing them, and the automated approval loop end to end.
5. 19 Invoicing & Getting Paid From line items to sent invoice: statuses, PO numbers, payments, credit memos, and exporting to accounting.
6. 20 Assets & Recurring Maintenance Asset types, registering equipment at sites, per-asset history, and the scheduling engine that generates maintenance work orders automatically.
7. 21 Working with Partners & Suppliers Partner records, subcontracting work orders, partner technicians in your dispatch, and supplier purchase orders.
8. 22 Projects at Scale: Rollouts & Imports The bulk playbook: import sites, generate work orders, import schedules and assignments, track the pipeline, and run issue tracking.
9. 23 Reporting & Operational Visibility Grids as the reporting engine, the project Reporting screen, report windows, deliverables as client reporting, and audit trails.

Part 4

Reference

1. 24 Import / Export Reference Every import and export type, where each center lives, and the mechanics common to all of them.
2. 25 Screen-by-Screen Reference Every screen and panel in BigWave, organized the way the application is, each entry pointing to its teaching chapter.
3. 26 Merge Field & Field Code Reference How merge fields work in document templates, field codes in HTML email templates, format strings, and the status action token.
4. 27 Glossary The canonical BigWave vocabulary, one place, alphabetical.