Part 2 — Set Up Your Company · Chapter 6

Users, Technicians & Access

People come in two overlapping flavors. Users are anyone with a login. Technicians are people who can be assigned to work. This chapter creates both, tours the technician record, and covers the unglamorous parts: finding someone’s login details and turning people off when they leave.

Creating internal users

Internal users are created under Setup/Contacts. For each person you set:

  • Name and contact details. Email matters, because alerts and password resets go there.
  • Access level: internal, technician, or both, per chapter 4.
  • Role: which permission set applies.
  • The Admin flag, sparingly. Admins can reshape company-wide settings. Two or three people should qualify, not ten.
  • Time zone, if your operation spans them. Schedule times display in each user’s own zone.

New users get a welcome email with their login. If someone never received theirs, or lost it, open their contact record. Their username is there and you can trigger a password reset instead of digging through old email.

Creating technicians

Technicians are added from Home/Manage/Technicians/Add Technician. A technician gets everything a user gets plus field-specific data. If a person already exists as an internal user, add the technician level to the same login rather than creating a second person. One human, one login.

Role note: partner companies bring their own technicians. Those are created on the partner record, chapter 21, and dispatch just like your own, but their access flows through the partner.

The technician record

Open any technician from the Technicians grid. Their screen has:

  • Assignments. Their upcoming and current work. The same list they see as My Assignments.
  • Contact Information. Their person details, editable in place.
  • My Badge. A presentable ID page with photo, name and credentials that a tech can pull up on their phone for site check-in. Some commercial customers require visible identification, and the badge answers that without printing anything.
  • Services. Which services this tech provides and at what rates, used when pricing their labor.
  • Documents. Licenses, certifications, W-9s, insurance certificates, with the same folder handling as everywhere else.
  • Work History. Every work order this tech has touched.
  • Out Of Office. Personal time off. The resource calendar shades them out during it, which is how vacations stop being dispatch surprises.
  • Ratings. Their scores per rating category, if you use ratings. See below.
  • Custom Fields and Audit, as on every record.

Ratings, briefly

If you score technicians per job, define the categories once under Setup/Technician Rating Categories. Workmanship, punctuality, whatever you’ll act on. Ratings are entered per work order on the Technician Ratings panel, and each tech’s record accumulates their averages. Skip the feature if you won’t act on the scores. A rating nobody reads is data entry with no customer.

Departments and coverage

Internal users can belong to departments, which matter in two places: workflow routing, where a workflow sits in a department’s queue until someone picks it up (chapter 7), and reporting. Region assignment connects users to customer regions so the right dispatcher sees the right work orders in My Region Assignments. Regions are set up per customer, chapter 8.

When someone leaves

Deactivate, never delete. Disabling the login keeps their name on every historical work order, comment and timecard while ending their access immediately. Check their out-of-office and assignments first. Reassign open work, then disable. A disabled technician stops appearing as assignable on the calendar.

Checklist

  1. Every human gets one login, with the union of levels they need.
  2. Set roles when you create the user, not later.
  3. Load each tech’s documents, licenses and insurance, at setup while they’re handy.
  4. Enter known vacations into Out Of Office as soon as they’re approved.
  5. Write the deactivation routine, reassign then disable, into wherever your offboarding checklist lives.

Commercial (Harbor Grill): the inspection contract requires badge-carrying techs with current license documents on file. The technician record holds both, and the customer never has to ask twice.

Residential (the Okafors): nothing special. Tom shows up, the work order tells him everything, and his badge is there if a homeowner wants to know who’s at the door.