Updating a job from the van

Three moves, and where the buttons are

A job you hold goes assigned → ongoing → completed, and each move is one button along the top of the job screen. They appear according to where the job actually is, so there is never a button that would be refused if you pressed it:

• The pause circle — mark it ongoing. Drawn while the job is assigned to you and work has not been declared started.
• The tick circle — complete it. Drawn on any job of yours that is not already finished.

You can go straight to completing without marking anything ongoing. A half-hour job does not need a progress note, and nothing chases you for one.

Marking a job ongoing

The screen is headed Mark ongoing and has one box: Where this job is up to, prompting What's done, what's left. Then Mark as ongoing.

This is the move worth making on a job that is going to run past today. The customer gets an email saying work has begun, sent as a reply on their own message, so it lands in the thread they are already watching — and the office stops wondering whether anybody turned up. See the emails WorkOrders sends for exactly what goes out.

The note you leave is for your own people. A job can be marked ongoing more than once from the website, each pass carrying its own note; from the app the button is the one that moves it out of assigned, and after that the useful action is completing it.

Completing a job

Complete job has up to three things on it, in this order.

Time on site

A switch — Record time on site — and, once it is on, a running total with a stepper for hours and a stepper for minutes. Minutes move in quarter hours, because the hour above forty-five belongs to the hours stepper and two ways to say the same duration is one way to get it wrong.

It does not open at zero. It opens at whatever the job already knows: a time already recorded, or failing that a suggestion counted from when you said you would arrive, rounded to the nearest quarter hour. The screen is blunt about what that is worth — "Rounded to the nearest 15 minutes. Adjust it — the suggestion counts from when you said you'd arrive, so a long lunch is in there too." It is a starting point to correct, not a measurement to agree with.

Leaving the switch off is a real answer rather than a shrug, and the screen says so: "Leave this off if you'd rather not say. Off is recorded as 'not measured', which is not the same as none." Off records nothing; zero would record a job that took no time. The office's report can tell those two apart, which it could not if the control started at zero and everybody tapped past it.

If you cannot see this card at all, that is deliberate. The app draws it only where there is somewhere to put the answer. A control whose value is thrown away between the screen and the office is worse than no control, because the person who filled it in has no way to tell.

Work carried out

Prompting What you did on site. This is the note that goes to your customer, in the completion email, in your words. Write it for them: "Replaced the mixer and tested" reads to a building manager the way it should, and "done" does not.

Health and safety notes

Prompting Hazards, isolations, permits. This one is internal and the customer never sees it, under any circumstance. It has its own article — see health and safety from the van — because where it goes and who reads it is a longer answer than a paragraph here.

Then Mark as completed. The job leaves your open work, the customer gets their email with the completion note in it, and the whole sequence — who took it, when, what they said at each step — is on the job's timeline for anyone who asks later.

"Not yours to do", and other things that mean refresh

Both screens can come back with an alert instead of closing. They are not errors and there is nothing to retry:

• Not yours to do — the job is not assigned to you any more. Usually the office reassigned it, or completed it for you.
• This job has moved on — it has already been finished or removed since your phone last looked.

Press OK and the screen closes and the list refreshes. What you were typing is gone, which is the honest outcome — there is no longer a job to attach it to. If you had written something long, it is worth ringing the office rather than retyping it into a job that somebody else has already closed.