Health and safety from the van

A second note, with a different audience

When a technician completes a job they are asked for two notes, and it matters that they are two. Work carried out is a message to the customer and is emailed to them. Health and safety notes — prompting Hazards, isolations, permits — is a message to your own firm, and the customer never sees it, under any circumstance.

That separation is enforced in the software rather than left to whoever is typing. The two are different fields, they go to different places, and there is no path by which the health and safety note reaches the person who raised the job. A technician can be frank about the state of a property without wondering whether the building's owner is about to read it.

It is optional, every time. Nothing is blocked by leaving it empty, and most jobs will.

What to put in it

What the next person attending needs to know, and what your firm would want on the record if somebody asked six months later. The prompt on the screen is the honest summary of it: hazards, isolations, permits. In practice that means the asbestos in the ceiling space, the main you isolated and where the valve is, the dog, the unguarded penetration you taped and coned, the fact that the switchboard is unlabelled.

It is not the place for anything about the work itself — that is what Work carried out is for, and it is the note the customer actually reads. See updating a job from the van.

Where it goes the moment it is written

Completing a job with a health and safety note on it emails that note to your company's health and safety address, straight away, from the phone in the van. It does not wait for a conversation at the yard and it does not wait for anybody to open the job.

That address has to exist, or nothing is sent. It is the Health email field at Settings → Your company. With it blank the note is still recorded on the job — nothing is lost — but no email goes anywhere, and no fallback recipient is invented, because guessing who should receive a hazard notice is worse than sending nothing. If your firm cares about this at all, filling that field in is the five-second job that makes the rest of this article work.

How it surfaces in the office

On the job page in the office the note is drawn as a warning panel rather than as a line of body text, so it cannot be scrolled past. In the app it is in the Notes card alongside the completion note — and, so that nobody has to scroll to find out whether there is one, the job's header carries a small red first-aid marker. That marker is how the next technician sent to that address knows to read before they arrive.

Sign-off: somebody in the office has read it

A note written and never read is a filing system, not a safety process. So a completed job sits in an Awaiting sign-off bucket on the office dashboard until an administrator opens it, reads the note, and presses Sign off. That records who read it and when, and takes the job off the worklist.

Three things about it are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• Administrators only, and never the app. The whole point is that somebody other than the technician who wrote the note has looked at it, so it is not something that can be cleared from the van.
• It is not a status. A signed-off job is still completed — it does not move off the board, out of the export, or out of any report that counts completed work. Sign-off is a fact about the paperwork sitting beside the fact about the work.
• It can be taken back. Revoke sign-off puts the job back on the worklist, and the original sign-off stays in the timeline with the revocation recorded next to it. A record that can be quietly unmade is not a record, and "who signed this off, and who undid that" is exactly the question anyone asks afterwards.

Reopening a completed job or deleting it clears the sign-off, because the work it was a sign-off of has changed. The timeline entries stay either way.

Jobs with no note

Every completed job goes through the worklist, not only the ones carrying a note — and where there is no note the sign-off screen says so, rather than showing an empty panel. So the bucket is a review of completed work with the hazard notes surfaced in it, not a queue of hazards. On a busy week that means most of what an administrator signs off says nothing alarming, which is the point at which people start clicking through without reading. Worth knowing before you decide how your firm uses it.