From paper tickets to a live dispatch board

The business

Picture a family HVAC company with four service trucks. The office runs on carbon-copy paper tickets: one for the tech, one for the office, one that's usually lost. The whiteboard by the door is the schedule, and it only makes sense to the one person who wrote it.

The problem

Every job gets written down at least three times — on the ticket, on the whiteboard, and again into the invoice program. Techs drive back to the shop just to pick up tickets. Finished jobs sit for days before anyone types up the invoice, and sometimes a completed job never gets billed at all.

What gets built

• One job board

  The office enters a job once. It appears on the schedule, on the right tech's phone, and in the billing queue — nobody copies anything.

• Techs work from their phones

  Each tech sees today's jobs, the address, the equipment history, and what the last visit found. They mark work done and add parts used right at the job site.

• Completed jobs flow to invoicing

  When a tech marks a job complete, a draft invoice is ready in the office — with the parts and labor already on it, connected to QuickBooks.

The payoff

• No job entered more than once, and no finished job that never gets billed.

• Techs stop driving back to the shop for paperwork — an errand that can easily eat an hour a day per truck.

• Invoices go out the day the work is done instead of the following week, so money comes in sooner.