Part 3 — Run Your Operation · Chapter 17

Technicians in the Field

Everything before this chapter was the office’s BigWave. This is Tom’s. What a technician sees on a phone in a driveway, and the short list of things he has to do so the office’s half of the system stays true. The field workflow is deliberately short, because a workflow techs won’t follow is a workflow you don’t have.

My Assignments

Tom logs in and lands on My Assignments: his jobs, dated, each linking to its work order. That work order shows him the description Priya wrote, the site address and contacts, the site’s custom fields including the gate code surfaced by the project per chapter 10, any standing site notes, and the deliverables the job owes.

Role note: what a tech sees of the work order is their role’s slice. The field panels, not Quote / Invoice. Chapter 4’s promise that nobody needs a list of what not to touch applies hardest in the field.

On site: the capture loop

The field discipline is four moves, all on the work order, all from the phone.

Status forward on arrival and again at completion, per the project’s flow. That’s what makes the portal, the pipeline and every alert truthful in real time.
Photos and documents onto the Documents panel as they’re taken. Before and after shots, the signed paper, the nameplate. Uploading on site beats “tonight from the truck” every time it’s tried.
Comments for anything the next person needs: what was found, what was done, what’s pending. Prefills from chapter 5 make the routine ones two taps.
Deliverables checked off as their documents land, so the office watches completeness instead of asking.

Signatures, where the job needs them, the Okafors signing off the panel upgrade or the HG-014 manager signing the inspection, are captured on the generated document and uploaded to the same panel, which completes its deliverable.

Time, materials, expenses

The work order’s Time / Materials / Expenses panel is where the job’s costs become records.

Time. Hours against the job, classified by time category (chapter 11), so Saturday’s hour knows it’s overtime before anyone bills it.
Materials. Parts used, picked from the materials database, with the project’s preferred list (chapter 11) putting the likely forty parts up front.
Expenses. The permit fee, the parking, the rented lift.

Entered in the field, these reach chapter 19’s invoicing already priced. The alternative, paper notes re-keyed by the office on Friday, is how line items get lost. Which is a polite way of saying it’s how revenue gets lost.

Timecards

Beyond per-job time, timecards track the working day itself. Checking in and out, with the record feeding payroll-side reporting and, where configured, automated labor entry, where the checked time flows onto work orders as labor lines instead of being typed twice. The project’s Timecards report (chapter 23) shows the entries, and the overdue-timecard timer (chapter 13) nags the techs who go quiet.

The two Beacons

Commercial (Harbor Grill): Tom’s inspection at HG-014. Status to In Progress at the gate, code already on his screen. Panels inspected, nameplate photos up, the generated inspection report signed by the manager and uploaded, deliverable checked, status to Report Submitted from the parking lot. Marcus’s alert fires before Tom’s truck starts.

Residential (the Okafors): the panel upgrade. Status forward, four photos, one comment (“replaced panel, all circuits verified, walked customer through the new labels”), 6.5 hours and the panel itself entered on site. Grace invoices the same day without a single question, which is the point of the whole discipline.

Making it stick

Keep the required field workflow to those four moves plus time entry, and say so out loud in training.
Make the phone the default. If a step needs a desktop, techs will batch it, and batched means late and lossy.
Use deliverables as the accountability surface instead of end-of-day check-in calls.
Watch a new tech’s first week of work orders and correct habits early. Retrofitting discipline is much harder.