Office and Field

The Office and the Field on One Job

By Travis Evans, Founder of TradeGOAT · 20+ years in the trades

For a long time the way my office found out a job was finished was a phone call. One of my guys would call from the truck, or I'd call him, and whoever answered would write down what got done. The ticket itself showed up later, usually in a stack with the rest of the week's paper, and the receipts came in whenever the truck got cleaned out.

Nobody was doing anything wrong. The field had the information and the office needed it, and the only thing connecting the two was a phone and somebody's memory. I built TradeGOAT so that both ends work on the same job, and what the field does shows up where the office is already looking.

What the tech does

A tech opens the job on his phone and opens the ticket from there. He writes up the work he did and finishes the ticket before he leaves. He doesn't pick the job from a list or type in a customer name, because he started from the job.

If he stopped at the supply house on the way, he adds the receipt on that same job with a photo and the amount. He clocks in and out on the phone too, and every punch is stamped with where he was when he made it.

That's all the field has to do. There isn't a second step where somebody turns it in.

What the office sees

Every job page in TradeGOAT has a section called From the field. When the tech finishes his ticket, it posts there. The receipt posts there too. The person in the office opens the job and reads what happened on it, in the order it happened, without calling anybody.

The hours come in the same way. The Time page shows the crew's punches, and each one has a pin that opens the spot on a map where it was made. If a punch is wrong, the office can correct it, and the change is recorded so there's a trail of who changed what. At the end of the week the hours are already a timecard for each person, with the odd ones flagged, and the office approves the rest.

Why it matters that it's the same job

The ticket, the receipt and the hours all land on the job that came from the signed proposal. That means the job page holds the price you promised and the work that was done against it, together.

When the job wraps up, the scorecard puts the hours you quoted next to the hours the crew clocked, priced at your own rates. Those clocked hours came in from the field one punch at a time while the job was running. Nobody had to rebuild them from memory afterward, which is how I used to do it and why I was never sure of the answer.

What changes in the office

The phone call doesn't go away completely, and I wouldn't want it to. My guys still call when something on a job needs a decision. What goes away is the call that only exists to find out what happened, and the Friday afternoon spent matching paper to jobs.

If you want to see what the two ends look like side by side, there's a demo you can click through at thetradegoat.com.