Whether you have two or 200 employees, your business’ success depends on their hard work. Passionate, motivated team players are the difference between surviving and thriving. But in field service, your employees are often far from the office. So how do you know which employees are carrying their weight? 

Time cards and field reports can be one way of trying to find out. But paper forms take time to get back, and are limited in information. Field Service Management software with mobile apps can improve your internal visibility and ability to make strategic decisions faster. Continue reading this article to learn how mobile apps built for the field can help with features designed to improve your operations and workflows.

Improving Your Operations with Mobile Apps: 3 Key Features to Consider

Field service management software has many applications and use cases. One important reason for many companies to implement the technology is to improve the data they collect from the field. The idea is to enrich the information collected in the field and make it accessible to view from anywhere, in real-time. Here are three key features that help you gain more visibility into your field operations with software:

Feature #1: Time and date stamps

Let’s say your paper work order says the work took three hours, but what if the customer only remembers the work taking two hours? This puts you in an awkward position with your customer and employee. By going mobile you can create more accurate records of hours worked. Simply open up a work order or service report, and the time is automatically entered. The app can even calculate time worked based on clocking in and clocking out. Time and date stamps ensure better accuracy and fewer issues for both invoices and payroll. Mobile time cards help businesses spend less on tracking employees and more on their actual work.

Feature #2: Image Capture

Sometimes, the work you need to do is obvious. You need to fix a major water leak or install a heating system. But for some businesses, like pest control, the work can be less obvious. Or if your work is technical, like pool maintenance, text can be confusing to customers. For the office, text isn’t verifiable. Adding pictures can be incredibly helpful for your business and customers. With one click, a mobile app gives you a great visual. It’s easier to show termite damage with a photo than with words. Visuals makes it easy for both your office and customers to understand. Photos educate clients and build trust in your work and analysis. Your business enjoys visual confirmation that work is either needed or was performed.

Feature #3. Dispatch

Sending out job information to field employees can be a hassle. Either they have to drive to and from the office between jobs, wasting time and gas. Or, they have to constantly check their email or phone for job information. How can you be sure that they get it, and follow through on the work? A dispatch system improves communication and provides more oversight. Dispatch with GoCanvas for Field Service Management can also track the progress of these appointments. The dispatch feature will show when employees opened the dispatch, when they started filling out the work order, and when it was completed. Sharing job information becomes easier, and you know when the job is done in real time. 

Oversight is never perfect. However, mobile apps allow you to have a better understanding of field employees’ work — not only when and where employees work, but also what they did. Being available in real time also helps you make strategic decisions about your workforce and ensure you have the strongest and most effective team.

Contact GoCanvas if you are ready to see how field service management software can help you save time and money (both in the field and in the office). We can share more of the features that make GoCanvas both easy to use and customizable to fit your unique business needs.

Field service management software has shown to increase productivity both for employees in the field and operations teams in the office. You may be wondering how field service management software works with your existing tools, for things like your accounting system. This article explains how field service management software can work in sync with an accounting system, like QuickBooks.

What is field service management software for Quickbooks?

Accounting software is one of the most popular tools in place, ensuring that businesses maintain a proper balance sheet and process payroll on time. Tools like Quickbooks are widely used by organizations to serve all of their accounting needs with software.

Field service management software is another popular category of software, often used to replace the paper forms, documents, or spreadsheets that are used in the field to capture data. By digitizing information using mobile forms and apps, field service organizations are able to streamline their operations and boost productivity by automating how data is collected and shared. 

Field service management software, like GoCanvas, and accounting software like QuickBooks, offer businesses of all sizes powerful tools to enable their operations. Cloud-based technology has become easier than ever to connect using APIs and integrations to sync data in real-time between systems. This means that field service management software can fit neatly into your company’s existing processes and share data instantly from the field, to the office, and to any other stakeholders that need the information.

Does GoCanvas for field service management integrate with Quickbooks?

As a leader in field service management software tools, GoCanvas provides an easy-to-use platform for mobile data collection and reporting. Our platform is designed to integrate with many of the tools your business already has in place, including QuickBooks. 

Here’s how it works:

• For QuickBooks Desktop: Our out-of-the-box solution, the GoCanvas Quickbooks Connector, integrates with the desktop version of Quickbooks.
• For QuickBooks Online: Our professional services team can help you integrate your GoCanvas apps with Quickbooks Online.
• For Zapier Customers: You may also be able to integrate GoCanvas with Quickbooks online through Zapier. Zapier is a third party service that allows their customers to connect different cloud-based services to one another to automate more of the tedious day-to-day tasks that they might be doing manually. 

Does this make sense for your business?

You may be wondering if it makes sense for your business to connect accounting software data with data from a field service management tool like GoCanvas. Here are the top reasons for leveraging an integration:

#1. Enrich information in the field 

Field service management software empowers your workers in the field to do their jobs easily from a mobile device or tablet. An integration makes this even more powerful by enriching forms with existing information that you already have in your accounting system.

For example, you may need accurate pricing information available to technicians in the field in real-time. Instead of relying on out-dated pricing information or manually jumping between different tools to find what’s needed, all of this information can be synced using an integration.

In this example, you can use real price data from QuickBooks for parts and materials inside your GoCanvas forms to create the proper totals on your customer charge documents. By connecting these systems, data is automatically synced in real-time, meaning you always have accurating pricing information available directly in your FSM solution.

There are many ways to enrich information in the field, including things like pre-populating forms with known information like customer records and project data, helping to cut down on the time it takes to fill out forms in the field. Consider the time-savings and productivity gains, and you can see how it makes sense to enrich information in the field, whenever possible.

#2. Sync data from the field back to the office

One of the main benefits of field service management software is the ability to rapidly collect data from the field and have it sync back to the office for more streamlined operations. Taking this a step further, a data integration can help to ensure that data from the field is automatically connected to the other tools that are used. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and cuts down on the time it takes to process information.

For example, you may need to accurately track inventory based on what has been used by your employees in the field and on job sites. With GoCanvas for FSM, you can track inventory based on real submission data and have it automatically update the inventory quantities in QuickBooks. This will simplify workflows and ensure that data is up to date and consistent across systems.

#3. Automating workflows

Cloud-based tools are designed to increase productivity for businesses, meaning that automation is a key reason for implementing these tools in the first place. One way to scale your business is by creating automated workflows that kick off one task, once another task has been completed. This involves no extra work from your team, meaning they can spend less time on busy work and more time on high value tasks.

For example, you may need to create an invoice once work has been completed in the field. With GoCanvas for FSM, you can set up an automatic invoice creation workflow that will save your accountant the hassle of manually entering invoices into QuickBooks. While these digital processes may take some time upfront to set up, there is significant benefit to your business. We have covered how it benefits your employees’ productivity, but the other key benefit is to your customers and their experience. By moving the customer experience to digital interactions that are connected, you provide a seamless digital experience for your customers that makes it easy for them to do business with you. 

To learn more about GoCanvas for field service management and how we can integrate with QuickBooks, contact our team here and we can set up a time to answer any questions you may have about technology to scale your business. If you already have GoCanvas or want to learn more about our integrations, check out this resource on our website and additional documentation here.

Is your company still using paper sheets to manage work orders? The drawbacks of using paper forms are often hidden, making it difficult to understand the true impact of paper forms on a business. Typically, as your business grows, the paper problem becomes more difficult to manage. Here are some of the top concerns:

• Rising direct costs of paper usage
• Manual workflows and time-consuming data entry
• Missing or inaccurate data that leads to rework
• Lack of insights into operations
• Hard to scale your business efficiently

By switching to digital work orders, your business can alleviate these data challenges. This article covers how digital work orders enable better data insights and ultimately how they can save your business time and money.

Top 3 Ways Digital Work Orders Can Impact Your Business

There are many reasons to switch from traditional paper forms over to digital work orders and software to help manage your business operations in the field. Let’s look at the top three ways going digital will help your growing business to scale more efficiently. 

1. Streamline processes for the field and the office

Companies with large field teams often rely on paper forms, but eventually find this process to be difficult to manage. Take for example Centurion Transport based in Australia, who found that their work orders could sometimes take a week or more to return from the field and process in the office. As a transportation and logistics company, the paperwork was difficult to manage, reporting errors were common, and long turnaround times for paperwork made it difficult to scale. After implementing digital work orders and other forms, Centurion realized a total cost savings of $100k annually by focusing on software to help them streamline and automate their business processes.

Digital work order management software is designed to connect the field and the office. Tools can be used to dispatch workers in the field and share information seamlessly back to the office. Since mobile forms are used to collect and share information from the work order, everything is managed centrally in the cloud. Improving workflows and eliminating paper can have a profound impact on the business. Taking it one step further, companies can also start to leverage automation to integrate work orders into their payroll and invoicing systems. Since work orders are managed using cloud-based tools, they can easily connect to the other cloud-based tools your business uses to manage its operations. 

2. Standardize how data is collected

Data is a valuable asset, but it’s easy for businesses to miss out on the opportunity to use data in meaningful ways. Paper forms are not ideal for data collection because they are hard to control what data is submitted from the field. If data on paper forms is missing or illegible, it can require rework to fix the problem or there is key information that’s unknown.

Digital work orders bring consistency and standardization for data collection in the field and for the office. Teams generating work orders from the office have standardized digital templates to be used for specific work order requests. Teams performing the work and documenting the work orders in the field will have mobile forms that can require certain information and types of data to be submitted. For example, they may have the ability to choose from a pre-set drop down list of options or they may be required to format data as a number rather than text. All of this leads to better data collection practices that can make the work order data useful when it needs to be reported on. 

The key outcome is better reporting and analytics for your business in real-time. Consistent data is better for reporting purposes and standard KPIs ensures you are collecting the right information from the field. In the case of work orders, this may help you to understand common challenges and problems that are happening with your teams, so you can take the appropriate response to help overcome these obstacles. Are there delays happening and where? What is causing down time? Where do we need additional resources in the field? All of these types of analysis become much easier when you have consistent and standard data available at your fingertips for reporting.

3. Create a better customer experience

With more competition and options for customers to choose from, it’s become more important than ever to provide a best in class customer experience, no matter how big or small your company may be. 

Customers expect the service experience to be effortless for them. So if your field service teams are interacting directly with the customer to complete work orders, it’s important to have a digital experience that streamlines the process for everyone involved. This could mean providing digital signatures for the customer to sign off, a digitized report with detailed explanation of work performed, and clear documentation on any next steps or scheduled work orders in the future.

Providing transparent documentation and an effortless experience for customers by leveraging simple digital technology for work orders can help to bring more satisfied customers and more revenue to your business. 

Ready to see a work order management system in action? Reach out to the team at GoCanvas to learn more about our mobile platform for managing work orders and digitizing your core business processes. 

Companies rely on collecting data in order to operate. In a fast-changing world, companies that focus on streamlining and improving their data collection processes will be able to do more. The good news is that it’s become easier than ever for businesses of all sizes to convert their workflows to digital processes, streamline tasks through automation, and take advantage of real-time analytics. 

5 Best Practices for Data Collection

Focusing on your business practices for data collection will help you scale your business growth and productivity. Here are some best practices tips to improve how your business collects data from the field and how to make the most of it in the office and anywhere else you need it.

1. Convert Processes Over to Digital 

A great first place to start with data collection is to audit where your business uses paper forms. If you have a high volume of paper forms being used for operational tasks, this can be an opportunity to convert these processes over to digital forms instead. When thinking about data collection, it’s important to make sure that information collected is easily accessible by the teams that need it. Paper forms can be a lost opportunity, with data that is siloed and difficult to roll up for analysis. 

The takeaway: Consider moving to digital forms instead of paper to capture data from anywhere on a mobile device and instantly have the information available online to utilize.

2. Leverage Software to Improve Productivity

Once you decide to bring your processes online, the next important step is to make sure you select the right software to power your business. One common challenge for companies is when they adopt tools like excel sheets, google sheets, word documents, and other similar types of basic online tools. While these applications are great for certain tasks, they aren’t always the right tool for collecting data on a large scale, across multiple people and teams. So while the information technically lives online in a spreadsheet, it’s still limited in your ability to report on that information or it requires you to wrangle information together. 

There are many tools available to help with field data collection and analysis. For example, work process software is designed to rapidly collect information from the field and automatically roll the information up for reporting purposes. 

The takeaway: Not all software tools are created equal. Consider investing in software that supports productivity and avoid tools that rely on manual workflows.

3. Standardize How Data is Collected

Once you decide on digital tools to help increase your productivity, make sure to consider how you are collecting information. Standardized data is an important concept and the basic idea is to ensure you are collecting data that is consistent and accurate. Luckily, there are many features built into data collection software tools that help ensure your data is standardized. Features like drop down lists, required fields, and auto populated fields are some of the ways to ensure that forms are filled out correctly. Here’s an example of how these features help with data consistency:

• Drop down lists. In this example, you would give a pre-set list of options for people to choose from when filling out a digital form. Leaving an open-ended field leaves room for interpretation, but features like drop-down lists help to promote consistent answers to form fills.
• Required fields. The option to require data ensures that information is not skipped over on the form. If information is missing from the form, it creates blind spots in your data and the information collected becomes less useful for reporting. Digital forms that require fields help promote complete data.
• Auto-populated fields. Many times when people are filling out forms, information is already known or exists in another database. The ability to pre-populate known information in digital forms allows you to shorten the time it takes to fill out forms and ensures data is pulled directly from your customer database or similar system.

4. Integrate Disparate Data and Automate Tasks

Disparate data is one of the greatest challenges for companies. You have gone through all of the trouble to bring processes online, but now data lives off in different systems and there’s no way to easily connect information. When selecting software to help your business, consider how you need to integrate data that is captured from digital forms. For example, you may want to connect to an accounting system for billing or payroll purposes, or you may want to integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) tools to update customer records. 

The takeaway: Instead of manually pulling together disparate data sources at the end of the week or month, consider the possibility of integrating your data collected. This will help you avoid data entry tasks and other manual processes that are easy enough to automate with the help of software tools.

5. Align Data Capture with Analytics and Reporting

The final best practice to consider is how you think about analytics and reporting. You want to make sure that the information you capture is easily accessible for analytics and reporting purposes. Analytics tools have become widely available for businesses to use and getting to useful reporting is easier than ever with modern software. Consider not just the collection of data, but how this ties into your goals for reporting on information. 

The takeaway: Improving data analytics capabilities can help you uncover trends and make data-driven decisions that result in improved productivity, cost savings and increased revenue.