Getting job details onto the engineer phone

Last updated: September 2026

What the van actually needs

A surprisingly short list. At the door, an engineer needs to know what the fault is, where exactly they are going, who to ask for, what the access arrangement is, and what happened here last time.

During the job they need to add notes and photographs, change the status, and put their hands on any document that belongs to the job. At the end they need to write it up and, ideally, price or bill it before they drive away.

Anything else is a nice extra. But if any of that list is missing on a phone, it will be done later, which in practice means it will be done badly or not at all.

Browser or installed app?

A responsive web app that opens in the phone browser has three practical advantages for a small trades business: nothing to install, nothing to update, and no argument about whose phone is too old.

It also means a new starter is working within a minute, on their own handset, without anyone provisioning anything. For a team of three, the cost of installing and maintaining software on personal phones is a real tax.

The trade-off is honest: a browser cannot do the things an installed application can, and the biggest of those is working with no connection at all.

Where Dispatch fits

Dispatch is a responsive web app built mobile first: large thumb targets, layouts that work on a small screen, and no installation. You open it in the browser you already have, and you can add it to the home screen so it opens like anything else on the phone.

A field technician sees their own assigned jobs, the dashboard tiles for their own work, and on each job the fault, the customer, the site address, the priority, the booked visit, the notes and the history. They can add photographs and notes, change status, raise a new job, request a fault report from the customer, and draft the invoice.

The week schedule is there too, all seven columns behind a horizontal scroll rather than crammed, and directions to a job open from the record. What a technician cannot do is administer the business: billing, business settings and the whole customer list stay with the office roles, which is set out in full on the roles and permissions page.

If you want the jobs in your own phone calendar as well, an engineer can turn on a private read-only feed carrying the job number and the site postcode, which is covered in syncing jobs to your calendar.

The signal problem, honestly

There is no offline mode. No local cache, no queue of changes waiting to upload. If there is no connection, the app does not work, and pretending otherwise would be the single most damaging thing this page could say.

The practical answer that trades businesses use: read the job before you go into the basement, the plant room or the loft, do the work, and write it up when you come back into signal. Photographs taken on the phone camera are still there to attach afterwards.

If the majority of your work is genuinely in signal-free places, that is a real constraint and worth weighing before you commit, rather than discovering in week three.

Getting it onto a team phone properly

Three small things make the difference between an engineer who uses it and one who does not.

Put it on the home screen. An icon gets opened; a bookmark in a browser menu does not. Installing it on your phone takes a minute: from Google Play on Android, or straight onto the home screen on iPhone.

Agree what counts as finished. A job is done when the write-up and the photographs are on it, not when the van door closes. That is a rule about behaviour, and the software only enforces the last step of it.

Let them see enough. A technician who cannot see the history of the property will ring the office to ask, and the office will spend its day reading records aloud.

What to check before you choose anything

Open the candidate on your own phone, outdoors, in daylight, with one hand, and try to write up a job. That is the real test and it takes four minutes.

Then try it on the oldest phone in the team. A tool that only behaves on a new handset will quietly divide your team into people who use it and people who do not, and the second group will be the ones on the road.