Service Work

One Stop, Six Tickets, One Signature

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

A tech pulls up to a building that has six machines on his list. He works them one at a time, and as he finishes each one he writes the ticket for it while the work is still fresh in his head. That is exactly what you want him doing. Six machines got serviced, so six tickets got written.

Then he needs a signature, and the day gets stupid. The person who signs for that building signed for him an hour ago and is now in a meeting on the other side of the property. He waits, or he walks the building looking for her, or he catches her on the way out and hands her a phone six times in a row while she says some version of didn't I just do this?

I came up in the elevator trade, where a single building routinely has four or six cars on one visit. The same afternoon happens in HVAC on a roof with eight rooftop units, in fire and life safety walking a hundred devices across one address, in overhead doors at a warehouse with twelve bays, and anywhere else one customer owns more than one of the thing you service.

The signature is why the records get merged

Here is what that friction actually does to your paperwork, and it is worse than the wasted twenty minutes.

A tech who has to chase six signatures learns to stop writing six tickets. He writes one ticket for the whole stop, lists the six units in the notes, and gets one signature. It is the reasonable thing for him to do, and it quietly costs you the thing you most need later.

Because now the work on unit three is not on unit three. It is in a paragraph on a ticket filed under unit one, or under the building, or under whatever the office picked. Two years from now when somebody asks what was done to that specific machine, or when you want to know which of these six is eating your labor, or when the new guy is standing in front of it at eleven at night, the answer is somewhere in a stack of stop-level tickets that nobody is going to read. I wrote a whole article about what the machine's own record is worth, and this is the most common way shops lose it. Not by deciding records do not matter. By making the signature harder than the record.

So sign once for the stop

When your tech finishes a ticket and he is still holding other unsigned tickets for that same customer, one thing appears above the finalize button. It asks whether he is signing for this whole stop, and underneath it lists the tickets, one row each, named by the unit it belongs to.

They come up already ticked, because he is standing in front of the customer and the whole point is that she signs once. He unticks anything that is not ready to go out. Then he captures one signature, and every ticket he had ticked gets finished with it.

It is a list rather than a count on purpose. The customer is signing for work on six specific machines, so she gets to see the six specific machines before she signs, in the two seconds it takes to read them. A number would have been easier to build and would have asked her to sign for something she cannot see.

Each ticket still says what he wrote at that machine

When those other tickets get finished, they are finished from what your tech already wrote in them at the time. The ticket he happens to have open on the screen does not get copied across the other five.

That sounds obvious right up until you think about how easy it would have been to build it the other way. He wrote up unit three when he was standing at unit three, with what he found and what he did to it. If signing the sixth ticket pushed the sixth ticket's write-up onto the other five, you would have traded six real records for one record copied six times, which is the same loss you started with wearing a nicer coat.

Everything else runs the way it does on a single ticket, because it is the same finishing step underneath. Each ticket derives its own billable and covered lines from the coverage on that machine, advances that machine's own service clock, generates its own document, and records who did the work.

Nothing gets decided at the truck

The first design I brought to the table had the tech tell the tool he was starting a visit, so the tool would know which tickets to group. That would have been a mistake, and I want to explain why, because it is the kind of thing software does to trades people constantly.

It asks a man to declare at eight in the morning what the day is going to turn out to be. Then the day does what days do. A car he cannot finish gets left for parts. He gets pulled to a callback at eleven and comes back at three. His phone locks in his pocket between the fourth and fifth machine and the tool loses track of a visit it invented.

There is no visit to declare and nothing that has to survive the walk between machines. The group is simply the tickets he is still holding for that customer at the moment he asks for the signature. An afternoon callback to the same building is its own stop with its own signature, because he signs for it when he is there, not because the tool guessed at a boundary hours earlier.

Two things are fenced off, both quietly. It only ever offers a tech his own held tickets, so one man's stop is one man's stop. A ticket that already carries a customer signature is finished business, and finished business does not get pulled back into a new signing session.

Where this fits with the rest of the work

The pattern underneath all of this is that the unit of truth is the machine, not the visit and not the customer. The ticket is what happened to that machine on that day. The log is what is true about it over the years. The agreement is what you promised the customer about it.

Every one of those falls apart the moment your paperwork starts describing stops instead of machines. Batch signing exists so that the easiest thing for your tech to do at the end of a six-machine building is also the thing that leaves you six clean records.

Straight about where this stands

This is live in the tool now. A tech finishing a ticket for a customer he is holding others for sees the stop question, ticks what the signature covers, signs once, and each of those tickets finishes on its own.

It came out of a working technician telling us what his day actually looks like at a building with four machines in it. That is where most of what we build comes from, and it is the reason it works the way it does instead of the way a product meeting would have drawn it.