Capturing a visit: notes, photos, readings and voice

You're on the roof with the panel off and one hand free. Whatever you record in the next few minutes is what the office and the customer will ever see of this visit, so Field is built to take it quickly and hold on to it, whether or not the phone has a bar.

Recording against the stop or against a unit

Open the stop and you'll see the work order, the customer and access notes, and the units at that site with their recent history. Against the stop, or against one unit in particular, you can type a note, enter readings in the structured fields, take photos, record a voice note, and answer the recommendation questions attached to any open finding. Put a reading or a photo on the unit it belongs to rather than on the stop in general. The report groups everything by unit, and a photo floating at the stop level leaves the office guessing which RTU it was.

Saved means saved on this phone

Field writes a note, a photo or a reading to the phone before it tells you it's saved, which is why a restart or a dead battery on the way down the ladder doesn't cost you anything. If the phone is out of storage you get an error when you try to save, not a saved mark the app can't stand behind.

Voice notes work the same way with one wrinkle. The recording is safe the moment you stop, and it stays on the phone through a crash or a restart, but turning it into text happens on our side, so until you're back in range you'll see the audio with no words under it. That's normal. The words show up once the phone has a connection. If a recording did get cut off partway, the app shows you a draft you can play back or a plain message that it didn't make it, and never a note that claims to be complete and isn't.

None of that is the same as talking to Bolt. Bolt is a live conversation, by voice or typing or both, and it needs a connection. When you have one you can talk to Bolt about the stop the way you'd talk to the office. When you don't, anything you say to Bolt sits as an unsent message, and nothing has been agreed to or acted on.

Units that aren't there, or are wrong

If there's a unit on the roof that isn't in the system, add it from the stop and start recording against it right away. If the one that is in the system has a wrong serial number or a label that doesn't match the nameplate, correct it on the spot. Both work with no signal, and both go up with everything else once you're back in range.

Some sites have more than one building, and the office can set those up by name. A unit belongs to one building on its site, so RTU-1 in the north building and RTU-1 in the south building are two different units with two different histories even though the labels match. Check which building you're standing on before you record against a unit, because the report keys on the unit itself rather than the label. Field can't create a new building yet. If you're at a site where the buildings haven't been set up and it matters, tell the office and they'll add them.

Small parts don't get their own unit. A failed thermostat goes on the report against the unit it serves, with a photo if that helps, and the same goes for any part that small. Don't add it as a new unit, because then the site has a standalone asset called "thermostat" that the office has to clean up later.

When the stop wasn't on your route

Dispatch will sometimes send you somewhere the phone never prepared, and you can still take notes and photos there. Field saves them as an unassigned record on the phone, and later, once the visit is in the system and on your phone, you tell it which stop and which unit they belong to. It won't guess from your location, from a unit label it's seen before, or from whatever screen happened to be open, because a photo filed against the wrong unit is worse than one waiting to be filed.

What the office sees

Everything you capture on a stop feeds the service report for that site. The draft groups your readings, photos and findings by unit, and by building where the site has more than one, and the office reviews it before anything goes to the customer.

"Saved on this phone" and "received by the office" are separate facts, and the app shows them separately on purpose. The office can't build the report off a photo that's still in your queue, so if your manager is waiting on a report, the word they're waiting for is received. The queue shows you what's still on the phone. Each item goes up once under the identity it got when you saved it, so a retry after a dropped connection doesn't hand the office a second copy of the same note.

Updated September 21, 2026.