Service Requests & Dispatch
A Service Request is the work order for a single job — what needs doing, for which customer, and at which location. Dispatching is scheduling a technician against that request for a specific date and time. Both are managed from the same two places: the Service Request list for the paperwork, and the Dispatch Board for scheduling.
Creating a service request
From Field Service → Service Request, click Add New. The form covers:
- Request Number, Status (New, Scheduled, In Progress, Completed, Cancelled, On Hold), Priority (Low, Medium, High, Critical), and Request Type (Installation, Repair, Maintenance, Inspection, Emergency, Other)
- Customer (required), Project Code, Service Agreement, and Form Template — the template list is filtered to templates built for the selected Request Type
- Billing Method — Direct Invoice, Estimate → Invoice, Estimate → Sales Order → Invoice, or No Charge
- Service Location — a full address, auto-filled from the customer's shipping or billing address when you pick a customer (you can still edit it)
- Requested Date, Scheduled Date, Estimated Duration (hrs), and Workforce — the technician assigned to the job
- Asset — the specific piece of the customer's equipment being serviced (the list is filtered to that customer's assets)
- Description, Resolution, Internal Notes, Completed Date, and Actual Duration (hrs)
- A Line Items tab for parts, labor, service charges, or other charges, each with a quantity, unit price, and whether it's taxable
The Dispatch Board
The Dispatch Board (the Field Service dashboard) is a three-panel scheduling screen:
- Workforce (left) — your technician roster, searchable, with an All Workforce option that shows everyone at once
- Schedule (center) — a day/week/month timeline. With All Workforce selected it's a Gantt-style board with one row per technician; selecting a single technician switches to a calendar view for just that person
- Pending Requests (right) — requests that are New or On Hold and not yet scheduled, searchable, each shown as a draggable card
To dispatch a request, drag its card from Pending Requests onto a technician's row at the time you want it scheduled. To reschedule, drag an existing dispatch bar to a new time, or drag its edges to resize the duration; dragging it onto a different technician's row reassigns it. Use the Day / Week / Month toggle and the date navigation at the top to move around, or click Today to jump back to the current date.
Below the schedule is a map showing the requests in the current date range as pins at their service address (geocoded automatically from the address on file), color-coded by status, with a list view you can open alongside it. It's a location reference for the jobs in view, not live technician tracking or turn-by-turn routing.
Dispatch status
Click a dispatch bar to open its details, where buttons let you move it through its lifecycle: Start (Assigned → En Route), Arrived (En Route → On Site), Complete (On Site → Completed), or Cancel at any point before completion. The same panel shows the request's customer, workforce, and scheduled time, and a View Details button that opens the full service request.
The on-site form
If a request has a Form Template selected, a Form tab appears on it with that template's fields — text, numbers, dates, dropdowns, checkboxes, text areas, and fields set aside for a photo or a signature (useful for a completion sign-off or a technician's confirmation). Some fields can be set to pull their value automatically from the request — for example, the site contact's name and phone from the Service Location, or the customer's name — instead of being typed in again.
Billing a completed request
Once a request's status is Completed, a Billing section appears on the Line Items tab with buttons for the transaction your Billing Method allows next — Create Estimate, Create Sales Order, or Create Invoice — which copies the request's line items and totals into the new transaction. A request set to No Charge shows no billing actions, and one where every applicable transaction already exists shows "All transactions created" instead.