What happened on site?
Your engineer spends the day at a new customer's office. The job was to install twenty handsets and a new router. While there, the office manager asks for two extra data points to be run to the meeting room, a phone moved to reception, and the old switch replaced because it was causing problems. The engineer does it all, because they want the customer happy.
The job sheet is a paper form, filled in at the end of the day in the car. It says 'handsets installed, router fitted, extra cabling'. The office gets it a week later. Nobody knows how many metres of cable, which switch was fitted, or whether the customer agreed to pay for the extra work. The invoice for the extras never goes out, or goes out and gets disputed.
Meanwhile the customer record still shows the old router, and the next engineer to visit has no idea what is in the comms cupboard.
Multiply that by every visit, every week, across a few engineers, and you have a business whose records of its own customers' sites are mostly in people's memories.
Why site information gets lost
- Paper or free-text job sheets capture what the engineer remembers, not what the office needs.
- Extra work agreed on site is verbal and has no sign-off.
- Parts and stock used are not recorded against the job.
- Photos of the comms cupboard, cabling and patch panels sit on personal phones.
- The job sheet reaches the office days later, if at all.
The cost of vague job sheets
| Missing detail | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Extra work not signed off | Unbilled, or billed and disputed |
| Parts used not recorded | Stock losses and unbilled equipment |
| Equipment on site not updated | Next engineer arrives unprepared |
| No photos | Arguments about what was there before |
| Job closed late | Invoice goes out late, cash waits |
Engineers are some of your most expensive people. When their extra work goes unbilled, you lose money twice: the time and the parts.
There is also a knock-on for support. When a customer rings with a fault, the support engineer's first questions are about what is on site: which router, which switch, which handsets, where the cabling runs. If the last visit was written up as 'extra cabling', they are starting blind, and the call takes longer or ends with another site visit that could have been avoided.
The mobile job sheet we build
- Each job is sent to the engineer's phone with the customer, site, contact, the work ordered and the equipment already recorded at that site.
- The engineer records what was done using simple choices (handsets installed by serial, router fitted, cable runs by count and length) rather than free text.
- Extra work is added as separate lines, priced from your rate card, and the customer signs on the phone to approve it before the engineer leaves.
- Photos of the comms cupboard, patch panel and new equipment are taken in the app and stored against the site.
- Parts and stock used come out of the engineer's van stock automatically.
- When the job is closed, the customer record is updated, the ordered and extra work go to billing, and the customer gets a job summary by email.
It works without signal in a basement comms room and syncs when the engineer is back in coverage.
A normal day, with it in use
The engineer arrives knowing what is already on site. Extra work is priced and signed for on the spot, which most customers prefer because there are no surprises later. The office sees closed jobs the same day, and billing goes out while the visit is still fresh in the customer's mind.
Six months later, when a different engineer is called to the same site for a fault, they can see the photos, the equipment and the cable runs before they set off.
Is this your situation?
- Engineer job sheets are paper or free text.
- Extra work done on site is often not billed.
- Nobody knows exactly what equipment is at each customer site.
- Photos from site visits live on engineers' phones.
- Job sheets reach the office days after the visit.