When the office changes your schedule

You're on a roof with an RTU open when the office decides your afternoon looks different now. Maybe a reactive call came in, or maybe they swapped who's on the crew. Either way, the thing everyone needs to know is whether the change reached you, so Field asks you to say so.

The change shows up in Field

When the office publishes a change to your work, whether that's a new stop, a moved time or a different crew, it shows in Field with a request to acknowledge it. That acknowledgment is the whole job. It tells the office you're working from the new plan, and it stops anything else from chasing you about it.

We don't promise that your phone will light up on the lock screen. When a message leaves our side, we know that it left and nothing more, not whether the phone displayed it or whether you read it, and we'd rather not build the shop's day around that. So the thing you can count on is that the change is in Field when you open it.

This only happens for a published change. The office can save draft changes to a sent visit while they work out the day, and Field keeps showing the plan they already sent until they publish. When something shows up asking for an acknowledgment, it's a real change and not someone thinking out loud.

If you don't acknowledge

Five minutes after a change goes out without an acknowledgment, Bolt sends you one text about it. Just the one, because a phone that buzzes every few minutes gets put face down. If there's no way for the change to reach your phone outside the app, the text goes right away instead of waiting the five minutes. On Android, and if you use Field in a browser, the text is currently the only way an update reaches you outside the app.

Another five minutes with no acknowledgment and the office sees that you need a call, and that's where the automatic part ends. Nobody gets a second text and the change doesn't keep re-sending itself, because at that point a person should be talking to a person. The same thing happens if we can't tell whether a message made it out: rather than guess and send it twice, we show the office that you need a call and let them follow up.

Acknowledge in Field when you see the change, even if the text already went. The text and the app are about the same change, and acknowledging in Field clears it.

Answering by text

If your shop has text replies turned on, you can acknowledge from the dispatch text itself. Each text carries an eight-character code for the change it's about, and replying with that code, on its own or with a "got it" in front, acknowledges that change and nothing else. Bolt texts back to confirm which update you acknowledged. Texts can arrive late, and a reply meant for an old change shouldn't accept a newer one, which is why the code matters and why a bare "got it" gets a question back instead of an acknowledgment. If you get dispatched by text without a Field account, the same reply with the code works for you.

"Got it, but I can't make that time" is not an acknowledgment. Bolt leaves the change unacknowledged, flags the conversation so the office sees it, and tells you to call if it can't wait. Anything else you text back gets saved for the office to look at. A text with a photo or any other attachment can't acknowledge anything, so send the code by itself if that's what you meant. Questions about the work belong with Bolt in Field, since the text line doesn't look anything up. STOP and START work the way they do with any business text: STOP ends the texts, START lets them resume, and nothing that was held in between gets replayed.

Field keeps the dispatch text and the recent messages after it, so a change that has since been replaced is still there to read. You just can't acknowledge the old one from it.

Old changes

Once a change has been acknowledged, or the office has replaced it with a newer one, or the day it was for has passed, it can't be acknowledged anymore. Field doesn't offer it and Bolt won't text about it. If you open Field and find the change you were about to acknowledge has been replaced, acknowledge the new one, since that's the plan the office is now working from.

For the office

Office shows two things about each published change, and they are different facts: whether the change reached the tech, and whether the tech acknowledged it. Reached means our message got out the door, not that the phone displayed it or that anyone read it, so the only evidence the tech has seen the change is the acknowledgment. After five minutes without one Bolt has sent its one text, and after ten the tech shows as needing a call, which is your cue to pick up the phone. Marking a text reply reviewed records that you read it, and it leaves the acknowledgment outstanding until the tech confirms. If a newer reply lands while you're marking one reviewed, Office shows you the newer one rather than clearing something you haven't seen.

Updated September 21, 2026.