From the whiteboard to the report to the repair quote, without the Sunday night.
Scheduling happens Sunday night on a whiteboard. Technicians drive across town twice. Reports are typed up from clipboard notes three days later. And the most profitable work you have, the repair of what you found, leaks away because nobody quoted it.
Where the day goes now
- Two technicians are in the same part of town on different days while a third drives forty minutes for a single extinguisher check.
- The inspection is done on paper and typed into Word at night. The report goes out late and looks like it was made in Word.
- A deficiency is found, noted on page four, and never becomes a quote. The customer calls a competitor to fix it.
- Fifty open findings across the territory and no idea which three could put a life or a lawsuit on you.
What Jobs changes
- Dispatch, Team Scheduling, Monthly Schedule, Routing Workbench. Drag jobs onto technicians and days, see the team on a map, and let the workbench build a multi-day plan from real drive times.
- Inspections done in the field. The technician works each system on a phone; every required question is answered before sign-off, and the report PDFs render the moment the visit is signed.
- Deficiencies become Service Quotes. Every failed answer is a record on the building. The Quote Queue holds the jobs still waiting to be priced, and the quote can be built and sent from the field.
- Liability Map. Open findings scored by severity and age, on a map, so you know which buildings to worry about tonight.
How a job is built
Every job belongs to a customer and, usually, a building. It carries the job type, status, priority and office, the scope of work, a scheduled date and time, an estimated duration in hours and days, the number of technicians it needs, a difficulty rating, and a purchase order number if the customer gave one. A job can also point at the contract that owes it, the national account above the customer, or a subcontractor it has been given to. Statuses move through Pending, Scheduled, In Progress, On Hold, Completed and Cancelled, and each transition is time-stamped.
An inspection is a job with an inspection type (Fire Alarm, Sprinkler, Fire Extinguishers, Fire Pump, Kitchen Hood, Backflow, Fire Hydrant, Standpipe, Fire Hose, Exit Signs and Emergency Lights, Paint Booth Suppression, Kitchen Hood Suppression, Survey, Emergency, and a repairs variant of each) and a frequency. A service is a job with a service type and the line items of parts, labor and catalog items it will bill.
Scheduling
- Dispatch is the day board: one lane per technician, jobs dragged into place, multi-day jobs spread across additional days, and a "Show My Team" layer that puts each technician's last reported position on the map.
- Team Scheduling is the week grid, one card per job dragged onto a technician and a day, with "Day 2 of 3" badges on multi-day work.
- Monthly Schedule is the month view, filtered by office, metro, attribute or technician.
- Routing Workbench plans several days at once. It pulls drive distances from Google's routing service, only offers technicians whose capabilities match the job, and re-orders each technician's day to cut the zigzag. You review the plan and publish it.
- Scheduling Assistant sits on the New Service and Edit Service screens and lists the technicians qualified for the visit's difficulty, with what they already have booked.
- Emergency puts today's jobs and every technician's last known position on one map, ranked by distance from the emergency address, and pre-fills a new service or inspection for the one you pick.
Inspections in the field
When the technician starts an inspection, InspectSync generates the forms for that visit: the forms that apply to every inspection, the forms matched to the inspection type and to each system on the building, and one copy per system where a form is answered per riser or per panel. A municipality that requires its own fillable PDF can have that form take the place of the default.
Each answer is stored as a snapshot of the question as it was asked, including the values that count as a failure, so a later change to the form never rewrites an old report. Questions can show or hide based on earlier answers, can carry forward the previous visit's answer, and can be pre-filled from the measuring tools assigned to the technician. A question marked required for report submission has to be answered before the form, the system or the visit can be signed off; a hidden question is never counted as a gap.
The technician photographs findings, marks a device no-access with a reason, adds a device found in the field that was not on the asset list, starts and pauses the job clock, and collects the customer's signature at approval. Quick Tips remembers the free-text answers given at that building on the last visit.
Fire extinguishers get their own handling: each unit has a serial, make, model and its last annual, six-year and hydrostatic dates, and the system works out what is due under NFPA 10. The technician can install, swap, loan and condemn units from the van screen; condemning a unit raises a deficiency.
Reports
The report engine renders one PDF per system type the moment the inspection is signed off, replacing any earlier set for that visit. From the office, the report is sent in one action to the contacts on the customer or building who hold the Reports role, through the company's own Office 365 mailbox when one is connected. The report can also be published to the customer portal automatically when it is generated, according to the publishing rules set for that customer or national account, or published by hand.
Deficiencies
A failed answer creates a deficiency against the building and, where it applies, the asset and the system. Each one carries a type (Critical, Non-Critical, Impairment, or unclassified, which is treated as severe), the failed value, the question text, and separate internal and customer-facing notes. The inspection's own result is Pass or Fail depending on whether any deficiency in its scope is still open.
When a later inspection visits the same building, the technician records an observation on each open deficiency: corrected, still deficient, condition changed, or unable to verify. The deficiency closes only when it is verified corrected, however many reports mention it in between.
The Liability Map scores every open deficiency by severity and age, with the multiplier capped so a very old minor item does not outrank a new critical one, and plots the result by building.
Service quotes and the Quote Queue
When the office reviews a completed inspection it can mark how many quotes the job needs; the job then sits in the Quote Queue until that many quotes exist. A service quote is priced from catalog items and the office's margin rules, with the quoted deficiencies attached, and can be created and sent from the field app or from the office. The customer opens it from a link, sees the PDF, and accepts or rejects it; acceptance is recorded with the respondent's name, email and address. An accepted quote becomes a service job with the items already on it, linked back to the quote.
Tasks and field requests
Tasks are assignable to-dos with a status, priority, due date and module. Field requests are raised by a technician from the phone to ask for a reschedule, a reassignment or a cancellation, and the office acknowledges and resolves them. The History page keeps an audit trail per job and per service quote.
Bottom line
Fewer windshield hours, reports rendered the same day, and the repair work that used to leak away now sits in a queue until it is quoted. The deficiency-to-quote loop is the highest-margin work in the company, and this module exists to keep it.
Inside this module
- Dashboard and All Jobs
- Emergency, Dispatch, Team Scheduling, Monthly Schedule, Routing Workbench
- Inspections, Deficiencies, Liability Map
- Services, Service Quotes, Quote Queue
- Tasks
- Field Requests