Observations

An observation is something one of your people noticed and thought you should know about: a broken gate at a site they were passing, a meter that needs replacing, a customer asking about extra work while they were there.

It’s a report, not a commitment. Nobody has agreed to do it, nothing is scheduled, and no customer has been quoted. It sits in an inbox until the office decides what to do with it. See Triaging observations.

Observation is one of the terms a brand can rename, the same as Job and Resource. See Terminology.

Why it isn’t a job

A job is work you’ve decided to do. It needs a customer, and it can be scheduled, assigned and taken through a lifecycle.

An observation needs none of that. The only thing the reporter has to fill in is a description. They don’t have to identify a customer, pick a job type or guess a priority. Those are the office’s decisions, and asking someone standing in the rain to make them produces records nobody trusts.

	Job	Observation
Needs a customer	Yes	No
Can be scheduled and assigned	Yes	No
Counts against your job allowance	Yes, once someone is on it	Never
Appears in the jobs list and on the dispatch board	Yes	No, it has its own inbox
Created by	The office, or your own software	Someone in the field, from the app

An observation never becomes a job by itself. If it’s worth doing, the office creates a job from it and the two records stay linked.

What gets reported

Report is a tab of its own along the bottom of the mobile app. Tapping it opens a short form.

• What did you see? The description, and the only thing they have to fill in.
• Where. Use my location captures where they’re standing, or they type it: “behind the depot, unit 4”. Either is fine, and so is neither.
• Link a customer you recognise, if they do.
• Photos, taken there and then or picked from the gallery.
• More details, folded away until they want it: Urgency of Low, Normal, High or Urgent, and a contact name, phone and email for whoever raised it with them.

From a job they’re working, Report a follow-up does the same thing and links the observation back to that job, which the office sees as Noticed during.

Reporting works without signal. The report waits on the phone and sends itself when the connection comes back. The reporter can also correct their own report while it’s still open, and the office sees that it was edited. See Reporting something.

Statuses

An observation is open until the office acts, and what they decided is recorded on it.

Status	What it means
Open	Waiting on a decision
Converted	A job was created from it
No action	The office closed it, with a reason
Withdrawn	The person who reported it took it back

The reporter sees the same outcomes in the app, worded for them: Awaiting review, then Job created with the job number, Closed with the reason, or Withdrawn.

None of the three end states can be reopened, by anyone. An observation records what somebody saw at a moment. If the thing is still a problem, report it again or create the job.

Who sees what

Everybody can report an observation from the app, external workers included.

The inbox, closing a report and creating a job from one are for Operators, Operations Managers, Brand Administrators and Tenant Admins. Resources and external workers see only their own reports, in the app. Custom roles can be given any of it: see Roles and permissions.

Every new observation sends a push notification to the people who can triage it, carrying its number and the start of the description. Nothing goes back the other way when it’s dealt with. The reporter finds out from Observations, behind the avatar in the top right corner of the app.

Turning reporting off

Reporting is on by default. A Tenant Admin can switch it off for the whole organisation under Settings > Security, in the card of mobile policies. The Report tab then disappears from the app, along with Report a follow-up. The inbox and everything already reported are untouched. See Security policies.

What’s next

• Triaging observations: the inbox, and the two decisions you can make
• Reporting something: the field worker’s side of it