Scheduling, payments, and proof of work for a service company
Scheduling, dispatch, crew mobile workflows, payments, and customer messaging in one system, designed mobile-first because the crews are never at a desk.
The problem
Scheduling ran on a whiteboard and a group text. Crews worked from printouts, completion was proven by trust, invoicing happened days later from paper notes, and nobody could answer basic questions about job profitability.
What we did
- 01
Designed for the phone first — the primary users are in a truck or a basement, not at a desk, so a desktop-only interface would simply not have been used.
- 02
Built scheduling with real dispatch logic including callout reassignment and automatic customer notification.
- 03
Integrated payment processing so completing a job triggers invoicing rather than starting a paperwork chain.
- 04
Made every external integration fail safely: with no credentials configured, the feature reports itself unavailable rather than silently pretending to work.
- 05
Kept typed contracts in a shared package so the mobile interface and the API could not drift apart.
The transferable lesson
Software for people who work with their hands has to survive gloves, sunlight, and one bar of signal. Any feature that assumes a desk and a stable connection will be abandoned in week two, whatever it does.