After a long wait, we want to announce the latest version of FieldVibe, the job scheduling app for home service businesses. Preparing this version was a long journey, we started with calling our users to find out more about the struggles of small home service businesses, back in September last year. After five months of user interviews, we started building the new version, which we now launch.
This whole time we had in mind the small business owners that are on-the-go, answering phone calls and managing a couple of employees. Our purpose is to help small home service businesses with their job scheduling.
The new things of this major version can be grouped in:
1. Improvements to existing features
– New type of staff: Admin staff
– Advanced editing for recurring jobs
– New layout for Client history
– Reports for staff users
– Pictures in the job description
2. New features
– Work schedule
– Export to PDF
– New screen: Messages
– Capturing signatures
– Ask for review automatic text message
3. Simplified pricing
This blog post will describe each new change and the reasons behind it… Read more about them below.
Simplified pricing
From now on, FieldVibe will offer three plans for the Business owners, depending on where they’re at. The first plan is called BASIC and it’s free. The other two plans are the SOLO plan and the CREWS plan, which require a monthly / yearly subscription. As the name suggests, the former is for business owners that are a one-man-show, without employees, while the latter is for owners with staff members.
– The BASIC (free) plan is limited to one device at a time and a certain number of jobs (25) and PDF exports (3) per month.
– The SOLO plan removes all these limitations and lets you add unlimited jobs and export unlimited PDFs.
– The CREWS plan will additionally let you add your employees for the job scheduling purpose.
The next two chapters will describe the Improvements and the New features of this new version of FieldVibe.
Improvements to existing features
This major update has a lot of improvements to existing features. This chapter will describe the five biggest improvements, but there are a lot more others that are just mentioned.
New type of staff: Admin staff
This was a very requested feature from our users. Now you can give permission to your staff members to see and manage the schedule of all your employees. The way you see/filter/assign jobs to your staff members, the same way your Admin staff will.
With this feature, FieldVibe is a great fit for two-man-show businesses. If you are two best friends with your business, you can both have permission to schedule and see each other jobs and reports. Of course this is a match for businesses where the Business owner delegates the scheduling to an employee. This will make FieldVibe a more versatile job scheduling app.
As a conclusion, now there are three types of users in FieldVibe: the Business owner, who can add either Staff members or Admin staff members (this one is newly added).
Advanced editing for recurring jobs
For all you cleaners and lawn cares, we apologize for the recurring job features that were incomplete!
Now you can individually edit each instance of the recurring job, so if your repeating client reschedules a weekly or monthly job, you can do that without screwing the rest of the bookings.
New layout for Client history
We redesigned what you see when searching through your clients. You can now better see the history of all the jobs you had and the notes attached to each job.
Reports for staff users
Transparency. Your staff members will be able to see how much time they logged and how much money they added. The way the Business owner sees the Reports for the entire business, the same way the Staff user will see the Reports, but just for himself.
The newly added role (the Admin staff), will see the Reports the same way the Business owner will.
Pictures in the job description
“A picture is worth a thousand words”, so you will be able to attach pictures as part of the job description. Beside the possibility to write text as a description, you will also be able to attach pictures.
Other improvements
There are other small improvements that are included in this update:
– Total in Time logs
– Save to Phone Contacts
– “End time” in text message templates
– Informative texts in Settings
– Deleting a staff member will not delete his assigned jobs
– Simplified the app by removing the Timeline and Status tabs
New features
Work schedule
For small and medium sized phones, the Calendar with 24/7 involves a lot of scrolling to see the juice. With this new feature you can customize what the Calendar looks like
You can now set your working schedule from Settings, and this will control what the Calendar tab shows. You can either choose to see the Calendar Monday to Sunday 24/7 or to only show the days and hours from your Work schedule.
Export to PDF
This new feature gives you the ability to export your FieldVibe data into PDF files that you need in your operations.
Now you can export three types of information:
– Job export
– Staff export
– Business export
Job report to PDF
The way a job is designed in FieldVibe, it has attachments like Photos, notes, payments, timelogs, tasks; all of which can be exported in a PDF document.
Staff report to PDF
The Staff report PDF has a time period (i.e. John Doe’s report for April) and will include all the time logs and payments that were added by the user in the selected period and also all the jobs assigned to that user in that period.
Business report to PDF
The Business report PDF also needs a time period for which to show the stats for. It will display the Time logs and the Payments added in that time period.
New screen: Messages
From the beginning, FieldVibe (the job scheduling app) sends automated text messages to your clients.
All the text messages you scheduled will be visible from now on in the app, if you go to More -> Messages.
Capturing signatures
The existing feature, Photos and notes, will have a new friend, which is the signature of your client.
At any time, you can ask for your client’s signature when you add a Note for the job.
Ask for review automatic text message
The same way you could choose to send an automated text message x hours before a job starts, with this new feature you can also choose how many hours/days after the job to pass to send an automated text message asking for feedback.
This message can be configured like all the other ones, from More -> Settings -> Text messages -> Text message templates.
Conclusions
As always, our mission is to help small home service businesses, and all these features and improvements are backing up our mission.
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