Job Management - Field

What are job management apps for the field?

Job management apps for field work cover a wide range of businesses, especially tradies. If your jobs are mainly service-based and generally last anywhere from an hour to a day, then this sort of application is the best fit for you. If your jobs are projects which go for weeks or months in one location and involve an valuable product as the key deliverable, then click here for a more appropriate option.

Scheduling

Once you have more than a couple of vans on the road, scheduling without a central system becomes inefficient. With a field app, a single dispatcher can see at a glance where everyone is, what they are working on and what's next. Once a job is assigned, the technician is notified immediately. Fit extra jobs in easily and keep your technicians' utilisation higher.

Job Costing

Whether you billed at an hourly rate or fixed-price, you need to know the full cost of a job for both time and materials. If a particular job is very profitable, then it's worth trying to replicate. If it isn't profitable, then finding out why can help avoid making the same mistake in the future. Having one number on the profit and loss shows you what happened but not why.

Job History

Whether it is for internal quality control or to respond to a customer complaint, if you don't have a record of what happened on the job then you are unable to take any decisive action. In the case of a customer complaint, that could mean erring on the side of caution and refunding a job or doing further work for free when it wasn't necessary. With a field system, you can take before and after photos, make notes and capture a customer signature.

Asset Management

If your business is built around recurring services of assets, either owned by your business or the customer's, then you need information such as location, service history and relevant notes easily available. If a technician unfamiliar with the site doesn't have access to this, then they will be a lot slower as they have to find the item, triple-check which one it is and then start the work.

Client Reports

Inspection reports and other types or reports can mean a lot of manual work for someeone as they compile the findings from the technician into the format of the report. Manually generating reports this way also leads to errors in data entry and can differ depending on the staff member who compiled it. A field system can take the input from the technician and follow a template composed of your business rules and generate a standardised report on the spot.

Management Reports

A cloud-based field system can run reports against the data contained within it. The ability to run a report against multiple dimensions such as type of work and location can highlight areas of the business that are doing well and others that are struggling. This information can also be used to link back to your marketing efforts to ensure that you are getting a return for your investment and which channels are the best for your goals. With information being entered as it happens, you don't need to wait until the end of month to be able to see what is happening, giving you the chance to fix small issues before they become major problems.