Workforce & Scheduling
Workforce is your roster of technicians and other field personnel — the people Field Service dispatches to jobs. It's the same Workforce list used by the Project module, so if your company runs both, it's one roster shared across them.
Where it lives
Field Service → Workforce, which is the same list as Miscellaneous → Workforce. You can also add someone straight from the Dispatch Board with Add Workforce.
A workforce record
Open a person to edit them:
- General — Employee or Vendor at the top (your own staff, or a contractor from a vendor), then Type (Technician, Laborer, Specialist, or Supervisor), the employee or vendor record, Work Center, Hourly Rate, Barcode, Email, Phone, Skills, and Certifications with issuer and expiry date.
- Work Schedule — see below.
For more on the shared fields, see the Workforce entry on the Miscellaneous page.
Work Schedule
Each person's Work Schedule tab has:
- A Timezone, defaulting to your company's
- Default Working Hours (start and end time)
- A day-by-day toggle for Monday through Sunday — turn a day on or off and set its own hours, or use Apply default to weekdays to set Monday–Friday to the default hours at once
This schedule is what Book now uses to suggest each technician's Next free time when you take a call, together with their existing visits and leave — so keep it current rather than leaving everyone on the default.
Portal access for technicians
Technicians can sign in themselves and see only their own work. On a saved workforce record, the contact details show either Portal user: with their account, or No portal access yet with an Invite to portal button.
- The invitation goes to the person's email, so add one to their employee or vendor record first.
- The new account gets technician access only: field service, limited to their own jobs.
- Once signed in, a technician sees only their own visits and the requests those visits belong to. They can move their visits forward (Start travel, Arrived, Complete visit) and fill in on-site forms, but they can't create, edit, schedule, bill, or delete requests, or open service agreements.
- Someone who already has an account can't be invited again from here — resend the invitation from Users instead.
If a technician signs in and sees "Your user is not linked to a workforce record", their account isn't connected to a workforce person yet. Invite them from the Workforce screen, or set their user on the record.
How dispatch uses the workforce
On the Dispatch Board, every active workforce member appears in the Workforce panel, marked Employee or Contractor, with the hours booked today and a status of Free today, Booked, En route, or On job based on today's visits. With All Workforce selected each person is a row on the timeline; selecting one person shows their own calendar. Dragging a request onto someone's row books them for it, and dragging a visit onto a different row reassigns it. A technician can't be double-booked — overlapping bookings are refused.
A person with an open visit (Assigned, En Route, or On Site) can't be deleted; reassign or cancel their visits first.
Relationship to Project's Assignments
Project has its own Assignments page, which uses the same Workforce records to assign people to projects by percentage allocation, with Grid, Timeline and Load views. Field Service doesn't use that allocation model — it books a technician for a specific visit window instead. A person can be tracked both ways at once: assigned to projects through Assignments, and dispatched to service calls through Field Service.