Create work
The 9pm call doesn’t have to wait for the office
Your lead tech can create a new dispatch, customer or building by filling in a simple sentence. It’s real work with real ESC numbers, created from a truck at the curb.
Fill in the sentence
Nobody wants to fill in a form on a phone, but everybody can finish a sentence.
Instead of twenty labeled boxes, the screen reads like a sentence with blanks in it: create a dispatch for this customer at this building for this kind of work, and send this tech on this day. Tap a blank, pick the answer and move on.
- You can see everything you’re creating on one screen, with no paging through field 7 of 20.
- Required fields are never hidden. If a blank still needs filling, you can see that it’s empty.
- Before anything is saved, it reads back in plain English, so you get a chance to confirm it’s right.
- It works the same way for a dispatch, a customer, a building or a purchase order, so you only have to learn it once.
Tap a blank and pick the answer.
Create a dispatch, customer, building or PO from one screen.
Anything still missing stays visibly blank.
The 9pm call
Here’s how that call usually goes today.
A property manager calls the on-call tech about a flooded restroom. The tech goes, fixes it and writes the details on the back of a receipt. The next morning, someone in the office pieces it together from a voicemail and a text. Half the time the job gets created a day late, at the wrong building, and the hours are a guess.
With ServiceProof, the tech creates the dispatch on the way there, so it’s in ESC before they arrive. They clock onto it, bill the parts, photograph the damage and write the note, and on Monday the office finds a finished job instead of a mystery.
- After-hours work is recorded as it happens.
- The hours are real, because they were tapped as they happened.
- The customer gets invoiced this week instead of next month.
Created from the curb at 9pm.
New customers and buildings
Sometimes the call comes from someone who isn’t in ESC yet. A new customer and their first building can both be created from the field.
- They get real ESC numbers, assigned the way ESC assigns them, so the new record looks like every other record because it is one.
- A new building under an existing customer inherits their tax setup, which is the detail that usually gets missed and discovered at month end.
- Search before you create. Type part of a name or an address and existing customers come up first, so you don’t make a second copy of one you already have.
- When a customer has twenty buildings, the search you used to find them carries into the building list, so you don’t have to scroll past the other nineteen.
Duplicate customers are one of the hardest messes to clean up in any system, so the app shows existing matches first.
Create new work or send someone to an existing job.
Send it to somebody
- Assign a tech to an existing job. In ESC that means adding a visit, so the original work stays intact and the new trip gets its own record.
- Assign several techs at once when a job needs a crew.
- Reschedule when the customer moves the date.
- Take a visit back when the plan changes.
- Leave it on the board for the office to assign in the morning if nobody should go yet.
The job list you assign from is sorted soonest first, with a line dividing what’s due now from what’s still ahead, because when you’re deciding who goes where, overdue work comes first.
The whole assignment is read back before it’s saved.
Who’s allowed
Creating work writes into your live system, so you decide who can do it.
- You give us the list of people allowed to create work, and everybody else gets the app without those buttons.
- Typically that’s your leads, your foremen and your on-call crew, the people who would have called the office anyway.
- Every attempt is logged, allowed or refused, with the name of the person who asked. Anything created in a live system should be traceable to a person.
- You can change the list at any time, and the change takes effect immediately.