Taking a job

A new job goes to everybody at once

Nobody in the office decides who is free. A job that has just come in is assigned to nobody, and it appears on the New tab of every phone in the company at the same moment, with the tab's badge going up by one. If notifications are allowed, the phones buzz.

It sits there as unclaimed work until somebody takes it. Nothing expires, nothing is automatically handed out, and no one person is on the hook for it — which is the point: the job is in front of whoever is actually free rather than in front of whoever the office guessed was.

Taking one

Two ways, and they do exactly the same thing:

• Open the job and tap the person-with-a-tick button at the top right.
• Swipe the row to the right in the list and tap Assign to Me.

Either opens a screen headed Claim job. Neither button is drawn on a job somebody already holds, so a job you can see the claim action on is a job that was still going when your phone last looked — which is not quite the same as one that is still going now. See below.

Hours before you're onsite

The claim screen asks one question, with a stepper: Hours before you're onsite, anywhere from 0 to 48. Underneath it the app works out the date and time that lands on and shows it back to you — "Expected onsite Thursday, Aug 14 at 2:30 PM" — so you are agreeing to a time rather than to a number.

This one is not internal. The screen says so: "The customer is told when to expect you, so a rough number beats none." When you claim the job, the customer's assignment email names you and says you have indicated you will attend within that many hours. A rough number really is better than leaving it at zero — zero reads as "on the way now".

Then press Assign to me. The job moves to assigned, appears on your My tab, and the customer gets their email. Nothing else is asked of you.

"Already taken" — somebody beat you to it

Two people can both be looking at the same unclaimed job — that is what "it goes to everybody" means — and one of them is going to be a second too late. When that happens the app does not show an error, because nothing went wrong. It shows a plain alert headed Already taken, saying Someone else has already taken this job.

Press OK and the claim screen closes and the list refreshes itself, so the row that was offering you a job that had gone stops offering it. You are back on a board that is telling the truth, which is the only useful thing to be handed at that moment.

A near relative of it is This job has moved on, which carries whatever the office's own system said — usually "WorkOrder not found. Please refresh and try again." or "This WorkOrder is unassigned or has already been completed." It means the same class of thing: the world changed while that screen was open. Same response, same refresh.

Once it is yours

A claimed job drops off everybody else's New tab. It is still visible on All, with your name on it, because hiding other people's work from the crew helps nobody — but only you can mark it ongoing or complete it. Somebody else trying is told Not yours to do.

The office can still step in. An administrator on the website can reassign a job, or complete one on behalf of a technician who has gone home with it open. That is not something the app can do from a van, and it is deliberately not: see a work order, start to finish for what the board can do that a phone cannot.

When somebody in the office hands you a job rather than you taking it, you get an email about it and your phone buzzes. Take a job yourself and neither happens — you already know.