Two systems, one job, and the clock is running
A facilities company that manages a chain of shops logs a job at 9am: back door will not lock at a branch. It arrives as an email from their helpdesk portal with a job number. Your office creates the job in your own system and sends an engineer. The engineer finishes at 12.30 and marks the job complete on their phone. Nobody updates the portal until 4pm, when the office gets to it.
The facilities company's system now shows your attendance as late, because the timestamps in their portal are when someone typed them, not when your engineer arrived. Their monthly scorecard puts you below target. The photos they require are still on the engineer's phone. The invoice is rejected because the job is not closed in their portal.
Their workflow and yours do not talk
Facilities companies run their own systems because they manage many trades across many sites. Every contractor has to work inside them. For a small locksmith firm with several facilities clients, that means several portals, each with its own statuses, required fields and photo rules.
- Jobs arrive by portal email and are retyped into your own system.
- Attendance and completion times are entered later from memory.
- Required photos and notes are sent separately or forgotten.
- Each portal needs its own login, statuses and wording.
- Invoices cannot be submitted until the job is closed in the portal.
Late on paper, even when you were on time
Facilities clients measure contractors on response and completion against their own targets. If your updates are late, your performance looks worse than it was, and contractor reviews are based on those numbers. Payment is held until portal paperwork is complete. And the office spends hours each week retyping information that already exists in your own job records.
One job record, synced both ways
We connect your job system to each facilities portal you work with, using the portal's API where one is offered, and structured email or careful browser automation where it is not.
- New jobs from the portal are read automatically and created in your job system with the client's reference, priority, site and description.
- The response target for each job is calculated from the portal's priority and shown to your office and engineer.
- When the engineer marks arrival, progress or completion on their phone, those times and notes are sent to the portal straight away.
- Photos and completion notes required by that client are checked before the engineer can close the job, then uploaded to the portal.
- Quotes for further work are submitted through the portal in the format it expects.
- Anything the connection cannot do (a portal change, a rejected update) lands in a short exception list for the office.
| Portal requirement | Handled by |
|---|---|
| Accept the job | Automatic when created in your system |
| Attendance time | Engineer's arrival tap, sent live |
| Photos and notes | Required on the engineer's phone, uploaded at close |
| Completion | Sent when the engineer closes the job |
| Invoice submission | Triggered once the portal shows the job closed |
Some portals change without warning, and some facilities companies do not allow automated access. We check each portal's terms and technical options before promising a connection, and tell you plainly if one can only be partly automated.
Updates happen when the work happens
The client's portal reflects what your engineers actually did and when. Your scorecard improves because it is accurate, not because anyone worked faster. Invoices go in as soon as the job closes. The office stops being a data entry team for other companies' systems.
Is portal admin eating your week?
- You retype facilities jobs from portal emails into your own system.
- Portal updates are done in a batch at the end of the day.
- Clients have queried response times that you know were met.
- Invoices are held because portal jobs are not closed.
- You work with more than one facilities portal.