The field app

Field-proven for years. Now wired to the whole platform.

Techs love this app, and that is earned rather than claimed: it has been a real technician’s daily tool for years, at a forty-truck plumbing company, against their real system. Every screenshot on this page is that app.

One screen per job, built for somebody standing in a mechanical room with a glove on one hand and a phone in the other. Big targets, plain words, and nothing that needs two hands or a good signal. What is new is what sits behind it — the job now arrives with your checklist on it, and what the tech captures becomes the proof the work happened.

Today’s work

Three tabs. No hunting, no filtering, no menu.

Current — what’s on them right now, including anything overdue.
Upcoming — booked for tomorrow and beyond. Each visit shows separately, so a four-day job shows four days.
Complete — finished work, still reachable for parts, photos and paperwork.

Late jobs say 16 HR LATE in red at the top of the card — not a subtle badge somebody has to notice. The customer, the building, the work description, the dispatch number, the address with a tap-through to maps, and the promised time are all on the card, so a tech knows whether to go before they open anything.

Cards are color-edged by state: live work, overdue, finished, waiting. It reads at arm’s length in a truck.

Current jobs list with two jobs, one marked 16 hours late and one 1 hour late.

The three tabs with live counts on each, and a completed job card showing the dispatch number, customer PO and crew size.

A job detail screen with the address, contacts, not-to-exceed amount, notes, equipment and history in one place.

The checklist for this job

This is the part that is new, and it is why the app is now worth more than the app. The job arrives with your checklist on it. Not a generic one — the one your office bound to this kind of work, this customer, this board.

It knows where it is. The same SOP renders one way at a CBRE-managed property and another at a restaurant chain, because the difference between two customers is data rather than a second version of the app.
The steps are in order and the app keeps the place. A job half-finished on Thursday is legible on Friday — to the tech, and to the office, without ringing anybody.
What it captures lands in real fields. Not in a note somebody has to read later, which is how a record stops being searchable exactly when it starts to matter.
Finishing hands the job on. To Parts, to the estimator, to billing — or to nobody, if that is what the workflow says. And the hand-off starts the next person’s list.

How a checklist gets attached to a job → · The same checklist, in your ear →

The time clock

This is the feature that pays for the app on its own, and it’s the one office managers react to first.

The tech taps. The server writes the time.

ON MY WAY when they leave. START WORK when they’re on site. COMPLETE when they’re done. One button at a time, always the next real step, never a menu of options to get wrong.

The tech never types a time and never picks one from a wheel. The moment of the tap is the time, taken from the server — so it can’t be a phone with the wrong clock, and it can’t be a guess made three hours later.

No AM/PM mix-ups. Nobody is typing 7:00 and meaning the other one.
No negative hours. An off time can’t land before an on time when neither was typed.
No Friday archaeology. Payroll stops being a week of “what time did you actually get there?”
Travel and on-site are separate. You can finally see drive time as its own number.
It can’t be back-dated. The times are what happened, not what somebody remembered.

The clock rail showing travel, work and complete steps with times.

The time clock rail with recorded on-site and off-site times.

The TRAVELING confirmation, with an optional note saying the tech is stopping for parts first.

A job mid-work showing promised, traveling and working times with the drive duration between them.

And they can’t clock a job they’re not on yet

A tech scrolling ahead to next Tuesday used to be able to put that job into TRAVEL by accident, which quietly wrecked the numbers for a day that hadn’t happened.

Upcoming jobs simply don’t offer the clock. The button is replaced by the date it opens and who to ring if they’re genuinely going early — never a dead button, never a silent failure.

They can still cancel an upcoming visit, because “I can’t make Monday” is a real thing a tech needs to say on Friday.

The complete step with its confirmation options.

Capture: photos, scans, signatures, readings

A step can ask for something, and the thing it asks for arrives as data rather than as a paragraph. That is the whole difference between a record you can search and a record you can only read.

📷

Photographs, with rules

The failed part, the nameplate, the panel before it goes back on. Required shots, before-and-after pairs, a minimum count, per asset or per room. Filed against the job, not texted to somebody’s personal phone.

📊

Readings, with tolerances

Pressures, temperatures, meter numbers, torque. In typed columns you can sort, filter by range and total — not in free text. Out of range raises its hand on site, while the tech is still standing there, rather than in a report somebody reads on Monday.

🔖

Barcode scans

A capture type on a step, not a feature area. The raw scanned string is kept verbatim, so what the scanner actually read is still there later.

🆔

Serials and nameplates

The plate gets photographed against the unit it belongs to, and the model and serial land as typed fields on the equipment record rather than in a paragraph. Reading them off the photograph automatically is the next step, and the photograph stays the evidence either way.

✍

Signatures

Captured on site, against the job, at the moment the customer agreed — which is the only moment that is worth anything. Never typed, never spoken, never assumed.

🔁

Per-unit loops

Twelve rooftop units on one roof, each with its own readings and its own photographs. One visit, one record, twelve complete sets — and the loop comes back round on its own.

🎥

Video and voice notes

A walk-around clip, or a spoken explanation the office can actually use, filed against the step that asked for it rather than dropped in a folder nobody opens.

📍

Where and when

Every answer carries the moment it was given and where the technician was standing when the step opened. The handset owns that clock on purpose — a crawlspace with no signal still has to record honestly — and the server records its own arrival time beside it, so the two can be compared.

And the metadata is read on the server, not on the phone Shrinking a photograph on the handset would be cheaper on cell service and it would destroy the EXIF before we ever saw it — so “we captured the metadata” would quietly become “the phone told us the metadata.” Instead the raw bytes cross the wire, the server reads the metadata and hashes the original, and only then is it resized. The hash is kept forever even when the original is discarded. Why that matters most to a courier →

Multi-day and multi-tech jobs, straight

Commercial work isn’t one tech for one hour. It’s three people over four days, plus somebody who came back for a part.

Every visit on the job is listed — who, which day, what state it’s in, and the hours on it.
A tech booked four days running sees four cards, not one. Nothing hides behind a roll-up.
The card tells you how many techs are on the job, so nobody turns up thinking they’re alone.
Finish your visit without finishing the job — the dispatch stays open for whoever’s next.

The visits list on a job showing several techs and dates with their status.

Notes that survive

The note is where the job actually gets explained. It shouldn’t be a one-line box.

8,000 characters — a full end-of-day write-up, not a shorthand scribble.
Your note can’t be clobbered. If the office is typing in the same job at the same time, both survive. Nobody loses a paragraph they just wrote.
You can see the dispatch notes, the location notes and the task list together — the standing instructions for the building as well as this call.
The office sees it the moment it’s saved, not at the end of the day.

The gate code, the tenant’s name, which door to use, why the last fix didn’t hold — the knowledge that usually lives in one tech’s head ends up in the job instead.

Tasks, location notes and dispatch notes shown together on the job screen.

Contacts and directions

Every contact slot the site carries — named, not a wall of numbers.
Tap to dial. Tap to email. No copying a number into the keypad with gloves on.
Duplicate numbers are folded together, so you get the one that matters instead of the same line three times.
The address opens the phone’s own maps app, with the route already in it.

It sounds small until you count how many times a day a tech does it. A twenty-truck shop does it a few hundred times a week.

The contacts panel on a job showing named contacts with phone numbers.

The phone's own call sheet offering to dial from the business line rather than the tech's personal number.

Equipment on site

What’s installed in that building, in the tech’s hand, before they walk in.

Make, model, serial, location in the building, install date and warranty.
Add a unit from the field when you find one nobody recorded — and photograph the dataplate while you’re standing at it.
Edit what’s wrong. The serial somebody transcribed badly in 2019 gets fixed by the person looking at it.
It writes straight into ESC’s equipment records — not a side list.

A dataplate photo takes four seconds and settles every future argument about which unit is which.

Equipment installed at the site, listed on the job screen.

Adding a dataplate photo to an equipment record.

Editing an equipment record: type, size and location, make, model and serial.

Every photo, every year

Your ESC server has been quietly collecting photos and documents for as long as you’ve run it. Almost none of it has ever been reachable from a truck.

The whole history, banded by year

Everything attached to this job, this building, this PO or a piece of equipment.
Grouped by year, so “what did this look like before the last repair” is two taps, not a support call.
Full-screen viewer that swipes, for reading a nameplate or a wiring diagram on site.
Take new photos straight onto the job — including from an iPhone, which stores them in a format most systems choke on. We convert it on the phone so it just works.

And you can send one to the customer

Share a photo out to the phone’s own share sheet — text it, email it, drop it in whatever the customer uses. The property manager who wants to see the corroded fitting before approving the quote gets it while the tech is still on site.

Sharing a site photo out through the phone's share sheet.

One site, one file trail

A photos and files header reading 178 on this site, with a collapsed list of years from 2018 to 2026 and a count on each. — 178 files at this address, eight years deep. Open the year, find the shot.

A file trail mixing photos, PDFs and emails, each row showing who added it, when, and the job number. — Photos, quotes, PDFs and emails together — with who added each one and which job it belongs to.

A full-screen photo of mechanical room piping, showing 5 of 178, with share, link and save buttons. — Full screen, with the date and job baked in. Share it, link it or save it without leaving the job.

A dataplate photo, fully legible: make, model number, part number, pressure setting and BTU capacity. — This is why the dataplate photo matters. Model, part number, PSI and capacity, still readable years later.

A tech who can see what the last four visits found walks in knowing the building. That’s the difference between a callback and a repair.

The story of the visit

Put all of the above together and you have the thing you are actually selling: a record of what happened, assembled as it happened.

Who went. When they left, when they arrived, and how long they were on site before work started — which is a real, measurable gap that most systems cannot even show you. What they found, what they photographed, what they measured, what came off the truck, who signed.

Not reconstructed on Friday from memory. Recorded at the time, by the person who was standing there. It is what you get paid against, what you are defended by, and what a general contractor or a national account asks for when there is an argument — and it is why a checklist is worth running rather than just worth having.

And usually this is where the crew gets punished

It is worth saying out loud, because every previous attempt to get better field data has meant a longer form, a stricter app and a technician who resents all of it. That trade is why compliance software gets quietly abandoned — not because the office stopped wanting the data, but because the crew stopped filling it in honestly and nobody could tell.

So the tech has to get the better end of this, and the test is simple: does the paperwork get done in the truck and on the job, or at the kitchen table at nine at night? Answers land as they are given rather than being re-keyed. A capture that cannot be taken right now is deferred and tracked, not skipped. And because a step declares what it needs rather than what screen to draw, the whole run can be answered out loud, hands free, on the drive to the next call — the earpiece that does it is being brought over from our own messaging platform. That is Wingman →

The office gets the data it needs to bill, the tech gets their evening back, and nobody had to lose for the other one to win.

See it on your own data What the office does with it →