Job management — how to do it in a modern, transparent way.

Talking to service companies across a wide range of industries, we keep coming across the same handful of basic ways of keeping records.

The most popular method is still a spreadsheet. Tables in which we collect the data from every job. That data usually reaches the office by email, through various messaging apps, or simply on scraps of paper. Someone in the office then keys it into the sheet. After a few hours of work a day the result is a table telling us which technician did which job and for how much.

Another popular way of collecting service data is the ring binder. Every report and every note goes into a binder that, as time passes, becomes a burden. Good luck to anyone who can easily dig out of that thicket the details of a customer who calls six months later asking for an inspection.

The least common approach is a dedicated management system. Often these are accounting packages with a service add-on. They let you collect data, prepare jobs and so on. The one thing they lack is mobility.

Service work happens in the field

Service work means being constantly on the move. We often drive to many different customers each day while taking in jobs for the days ahead. A real race against the clock. Add to that the need to account for working time, to keep in touch with regular customers and everything else, and it often turns out that twenty-four hours is not enough. We cannot reduce the time spent on the jobs themselves, but one thing we certainly can do is cut the time spent gathering documentation and preparing reports. How? The simplest method is to put a job management system with a mobile app into your service operation.

Imagine that a job accepted by the dispatcher appears on your technician’s phone at that very moment. They already know that tomorrow morning they have to drive to the customer and carry out a specific job. They can also glance at the data from the previous job for that customer, see who was there and what was serviced. Once the job is finished, the system prepares the report automatically, totals the working time and the costs, flags whether the customer has paid and, if needed, even issues a receipt and emails it to the customer. In doing so we have just gained several hours of both the dispatcher’s and the technician’s time — the technician no longer has to call at the office every morning to pick up job information, because they know exactly what to do and when. The savings are obvious.

To sum up: if your service operation is currently a constant fight against the clock, hunting for information about jobs and preparing reports for management, this is a good moment to look for the right software for you. There are several solutions available on the market. It is worth testing a few of them to pick the one that meets all your expectations.

If you want to see how our solution would affect your work, sign up for a free 14-day trial. After registering you will receive, by email, a link to short videos showing how easy it is to get started.