Many companies using vWorkApp have employees out in the field talking to customers, inspecting job sites or quoting on work. These mobile workers need to be able to create jobs on the run. The latest release of vWorkApp makes this possible. Here is how to set it up:

On the User Admin page, you can see a new permission setting called “Mobile Create Jobs”. You can enable this option for any of your mobile workers.

Once this setting is enabled, a new option will appear on their phone. (Please make sure they are running the latest version of vWorkApp or this option will not appear.)

The new option is called “Create Job” and allows your workers to access any of your existing templates or customers when creating a job. They can also create a new customer if they need to.

At the moment, the new job is sent back to vWorkApp as soon as it has been created for a dispatcher to assign to someone. (If the phone is out of coverage, the new job will be sent to vWorkApp as soon as it comes back into coverage.)

We are currently exploring other options such as exposing only some templates to workers or allowing workers to assign jobs to themselves if no dispatcher is available.

Please let us know if you run into any problems and we’ll keep working on adding other new features as quickly as we can.

We have added a new reporting module called favorites, it allows you to create a custom report and then save it to re-use it again later, here’s how it works:

If you click on the reports button in vWorkApp, you will see a new tab called “Favorite Reports”. Or click here to jump straight to Favorite Reports. Once there, click the “Create Favorite” button to add a new favorite.

In this example, we have created a report that will show all of the Job Sheets for a specific worker for jobs that have not been started. Start by giving the report a name, in this case “Bob’s Jobs”.

Then choose which report the favorite should be based on, in this example we have selected “Job Sheets”. We then selected the filters for the worker (Bob) and the job status (Not Started).

Once this favorite is saved by clicking the “Create” button it becomes available to re-use anywhere you can select reports. It appears in the list of available reports on the main reports page as well as in the list of available reports on the “Scheduled Reports” page.

If you need a hand setting up your reports, please let us know.

A while back, we spoke about the ability to create vWorkApp logins for your regular customers. This would enable them to login and see all their own jobs. If you gave them permission, they could also create new jobs.

One of the limitations was that they could only see their own jobs. We have now exapanded on that functionality in a couple of ways:

1.  You can now give them less permission. By choosing “Created Jobs Only” from the pull down menu on the Customer Portal Admin page, your customer will only be able to see jobs they have created through the customer portal.

2.  You can also give them more permission so that they can see every job created for them, whether they created it themselves or you created it on their behalf. Simply choose “All Jobs for Customer” from the permissions pull down menu.

3. We have also added the ability for you to create a login that is allowed to see jobs for multiple customers. This can be useful if you need to use a different customer name when dealing with different branches of a company.

4. By default, your customers will only have permission to see their jobs and make changes if they have not been started yet. If you want to give them the ability to create new jobs as well, you need to give them access to one or more templates. Simply select the template(s) you want them to use at the bottom of the page.

If you run into any problems with setting up logins for your customers, please let us know, we would be happy to help you get everything set up properly.