The app on your phone

What the app is for

The app is the field half of WorkOrders. Everything the office does — connecting a mailbox, raising a job, running reports, changing a plan — happens on the website. The app does the part that happens away from a desk: seeing what has come in, taking a job, and saying what happened on site.

It is free, it is not a separate purchase, and it is not billed per device. A seat is a person, so somebody who works in the office on a laptop and takes a job on their phone at the weekend is one seat, not two.

Which phones it runs on

It runs on iPhone and iPad, and it is on the App Store — search for WorkOrders, or follow that link. The store listing states the version of iOS it needs, which at the time of writing is iOS 17.5 or later. Check the listing rather than this page if somebody's phone is old enough for it to matter: the store knows what the current release needs and this page only knows what it needed when it was written.

There is nothing to configure on a phone beyond installing it and signing in — no server address to type, no profile to install. See signing in on your phone.

The three tabs

The whole app is one list of jobs, shown three ways along the bottom of the screen.

• New — every job in your company that nobody has taken yet. It carries a number badge, so the count of unclaimed work is visible from the home screen without opening anything.
• My — the jobs assigned to you, whatever state they are in. Assigned, ongoing and completed all sit here together.
• All — everything your company has, including other people's work and jobs that are already finished.

Everyone in the company sees the same board. There is no per-person filtering of what is visible — My is a view of the same list, not a different set of jobs.

Finding a job

Each tab has a search box on it, prompting Search work orders.... Start typing and four chips appear: All, Summary, Subject and Contact. They narrow what is being matched, which is the difference between typing a surname and getting one job or getting nine. The job reference is searchable too, so a WO- number read out over the phone can be typed straight in. Searching only ever looks inside the tab you are on — nothing on My will turn up a job that is not yours.

Above the first row is a line saying when the list was last brought up to date — "Updated 2 min ago". The app refreshes itself about once a minute while it is open and in front of you; you can also pull the list down, or use the circular arrow at the top right. Nothing on the phone is more than about a minute behind the office while somebody is looking at it.

What you can do to a job

Open a job and you get the whole request, not a dispatch line: who asked and their email, the customer with a phone number that dials from the screen, the site with an address that opens in maps, the job's timeline, any notes left on it, the files that came with it, and the original message. Then, depending on where the job is and whose it is, the buttons along the top let you:

• Take it, if nobody has — see taking a job.
• Mark it ongoing or complete it, if it is yours — see updating a job from the van.
• Add a photo or video — see photos and files from site.
• Delete it, if you are an administrator. It asks for a reason and will not go without one, the same as on the website.

A button you cannot see is a button you cannot use: the app draws the ongoing and complete actions only on a job that is yours, and the claim action only on one nobody holds. Nothing is offered and then refused.

What it leaves to the website

This is the shorter and more useful list. None of the following is in the app, and none of it is an oversight:

• Raising a job. Work arrives by email or is typed in at a desk — see how work gets into WorkOrders.
• Handing a job to somebody else. A technician takes their own work; reassigning is done from the board.
• Signing off a health and safety note. The point of that review is that somebody other than the person who wrote the note reads it — see health and safety from the van.
• Reports, the export and the workload calendar. The export carries every customer's contact details, so it stays where the role checks are.
• Anything in Settings — the company details, the team, mailboxes, the plan.

The gear, and what is behind it

The gear at the top left of the list opens Settings: the name, email, contact number and organisation this phone is signed in as, an Administrator row if that is what you are, and Sign out. Below that, About WorkOrders shows the version, what it is connected to, and when it last synced — which is the screen to read out if you are on the phone to somebody trying to work out why two people are seeing different things.

The first time the job list appears, iOS asks whether the app may send notifications. Say yes: a new job buzzing a phone is how work gets to whoever is free. Declining does not break anything — the list still refreshes itself about once a minute — but nobody is told about a job until they open the app and look.