Yoke for Field Service

Yoke for Field Service is the office side of an HVAC, plumbing or multi-trade service business: a dispatcher board of every open work order, a schedule by technician, a list of the jobs that have stalled, and an operations assistant that reads the same data and tells you what to fix.

It is free to install, and the install starts a 90-day trial of the full assistant.

The workflow

Every job follows one lifecycle:

Created → Dispatched → On site → Completed → Invoiced → Paid

A job can also leave the board two other ways. It is declined when the customer calls it off before anyone starts work, whether before or after a technician is dispatched. It is a no-show when the customer was not there when the technician arrived. Almost every service call follows this path, and a shared lifecycle is what lets the board, the schedule and the assistant read your jobs without you configuring anything.

A job stopped once work is under way is not declined. An administrator closes it with an override, which records who did it and why.

Jobs imported from ServiceTitan or Jobber land on the same lifecycle, with each vendor's statuses mapped onto it. "En route" becomes Dispatched, "In progress" becomes On site, "Billed" becomes Invoiced, and a job the vendor shows as cancelled arrives as Declined.

The dispatcher board

Dispatcher → Board shows one lane per open stage. Each card shows the customer, when the visit is booked, the job type and the technician. It refreshes every 30 seconds and whenever you come back to the tab, so changes made by someone else in the office appear without a reload.

A card turns red when a job has sat in its stage for longer than a service business can afford:

The Tech load panel counts each technician's open jobs, heaviest first. Select a technician to see their queue and their last twenty jobs.

Quick actions

Open the ⋮ menu on a card to:

• Reassign the job to another technician. Technicians already on the board are suggested as you type.
• Reschedule the visit. Pick a date and time in your own time zone; it is stored as a single point in time, so the schedule shows it on the right day for everyone in the office.
• Mark no-show, while the job is Dispatched. You are asked to confirm, the job leaves the board, and the change is recorded in the job's history under your name. Once a technician is on site, a no-show no longer applies and the option is not offered.

Reassigning and rescheduling are recorded in the job record's history against the person who made the change.

Stuck jobs and the schedule

• Stuck jobs lists every flagged job across all stages, longest-stuck first. It is a morning stand-up list: the job at the top is the one to chase.
• Schedule shows one day's visits grouped by technician, with an Unassigned row at the top for the bookings nobody has taken yet.

The operations assistant

The Yoke page is an inbox of briefs: short, specific findings about how your jobs are moving. Each one names the evidence and what to change. Examples:

• jobs that have stalled in a stage,
• a stage that has become slower than it used to be,
• invoices that take longer and longer to go out after the work is done,
• technicians who are much busier than their colleagues,
• jobs at risk of a no-show, once there is enough history to learn from. Those jobs get a yellow border on the board.

Impact tracks what the briefs you acted on actually changed. After the 90-day trial ends, briefs about the shape of your workflow keep coming. The data-driven ones need a paid plan.

With CRM Suite

Install CRM Suite alongside and every customer record gains an HVAC Jobs panel. It lists that customer's jobs, including those synced from ServiceTitan or Jobber, and has a Create a New Job button. A job created there starts in Created and appears on the dispatcher board straight away. See Cross-App Connections.

Setting up the books for a service trade

A workspace set up for Field Service has a chart of accounts built for a service trade waiting in its setup checklist. It includes truck stock, deferred maintenance-plan revenue, and warranty and callback cost. A few optional accounts, such as refrigerant inventory and trip and diagnostic fees, are offered unticked. The accounts that carry legal obligations (sales tax, payroll withholding, customer deposits, refrigerant) are marked as worth checking with your accountant. Nothing is added until you accept it.

Adding steps to the workflow

Not every shop runs the same six stages. Concierge offers the extra workflow steps many service businesses need, one at a time, and only the ones your workflow does not have yet:

• estimate approval before anyone drives out,
• approval of extra work found on site,
• waiting on parts,
• callbacks and second visits,
• warranty claims,
• permits and inspections.

Each is shown with what it adds before you accept it. An accepted step appears on the dispatcher board as its own lane, in its place in the lifecycle, and a job that sits in it for more than two days is flagged as stuck.

The change applies to jobs created from then on. A job already in progress finishes on the workflow it started on, so nothing moves under a technician mid-visit. Steps are only ever added: the existing stages keep their names, because every job's history is recorded against them.

The same steps are offered for a work-order app you build from the Field Service template.

Getting started

If you chose Field Service as your industry when you signed up, this is the app you are offered first. Setting it up installs it with sample data and opens the dispatcher board, which then becomes your workspace's home page.

Demo data

The sample data is an HVAC and plumbing business: 50 customers and fourteen months of jobs, from tune-ups and furnace repairs to water heaters, leaks and sewer-camera inspections. A few jobs are deliberately stuck, late to invoice or slow on site, so the assistant has something to say on the first day. When installing from the Marketplace instead, tick the demo dataset option to get the same data.

The sample rows are kept apart from your own. Uninstalling the app removes them, and so does starting your books for real. Jobs and customers you create yourself, or sync from ServiceTitan or Jobber, are never touched.