Give a technician the field app

By the end of this article you will know what a new technician needs from you to start using the field app, what they will and will not see in it, and what to do about a lost phone.

There is no separate app access

The field app and the office are one account. Anyone you invite from Team → Employees can install the app and sign in with the same email and the password they set from their invite. There is no switch to turn the app on for someone, and nothing to buy per device.

What the app shows them is decided by their role, exactly as in the office:

• A Technician sees their own assigned jobs, the customers and vehicles on them, their route for the day, their schedule, and the catalog. They can clock in and out, add a customer met in the driveway, build a quote, invoice the job they are on and collect its payment. They never see billing, payroll, reports or settings.
• A Manager sees the same field tools plus what their office role allows, so they can work a job and still run the day.
• Accounting and Viewer can sign in, but the app is built for the field and will show them little of use.

The first sign-in

1. Invite the person as described in “Invite an employee and set their role”, and ask them to set their password from the email.
2. They install the app and sign in with that email and password. If they work for more than one business on the platform, the app asks which company they are working for right now; they can switch later from the app.
3. The app downloads their jobs, customers and catalog for offline use. From then on it keeps itself in step with the office whenever it has signal, and queues what they do without signal until it does.

A technician who has no jobs assigned yet will see an empty day, not an error. Assign them a job from the calendar or a job’s page and it appears on their phone on the next sync.

What the phone holds, and what it never holds

The app keeps only what the person’s role allows on the device, and only for their own work: a technician’s phone never carries another technician’s jobs, the company’s invoices, or your reviews. Anything their role loses — a change from Manager to Technician, for instance — stops reaching the phone from the next sync.

The app can also lock itself behind the phone’s face, fingerprint or passcode unlock, so a phone left on a seat does not open onto your customer list.

Devices, lost phones and leavers

Each person manages their own signed-in phones from the app’s settings, under “Your Devices”: they can see every device with an active sign-in, remove one — it is signed out and must sign in again — or sign out of all of them at once, which also clears the offline data on each. Work that had not yet reached the office is lost with that data, so “sign out all” is for a phone that is gone, not one that is merely at home.

You cannot see or remove someone’s devices from the office. What you can do is switch off Active Employee on their record: every device signed in as them is refused on its next request, which for a phone with signal is immediate. Deactivation is the right answer for a leaver and for a stolen phone alike — see “Deactivate an employee”.

Good to know

• The password is theirs. You never see or set it. If they forget it, they reset it from the office sign-in page in a browser; if the invite email expired unused, resend it from the pending row.
• One phone per person is not a rule. The same person can be signed in on a phone and a tablet; both sync.
• Working hours and time off are set from the office and read in the app; a technician can request a day off from the app for you to approve. See “Working hours and time off for a technician”.