Reviewing and sending a service report

The tech closes out the visit from the truck, and a while later a report shows up in your queue with their name on it. Bolt drafted it from what they captured on site: their notes, their readings, their photos, and the units they attached each of those to. It's a starting point that a person reads before the customer does, which is where you come in.

Where the report comes from

Finishing the visit and drafting the report are two separate things, and Reports shows them separately. When a tech completes a visit while you have Reports open, the completion appears on its own, the report shows up as it gets prepared, and ready is its own mark after that. So a visit can be complete with the report still on its way, which isn't a problem by itself.

Bolt matches each capture to a unit by the unit's identity rather than by its label. That's why a site with an RTU-1 on the north building and another RTU-1 on the south building doesn't end up with both sets of readings under one heading. A label on its own is only used when no other unit on the site shares it.

What the customer needs from it

The customer wants to know where the tech went, which units were touched, what they found, what got done, which readings matter, and what still needs doing. The draft's job is to put the tech's facts under the right unit in language the property manager can follow, and your job is to read it the way the property manager will. Completed work should read as completed. The belt the tech couldn't replace should read as a recommendation rather than as work that was done, because work that was done belongs in the report and work that still needs approval belongs in a deficiency and a quote. A finding on the report can be carried into a repair quote from there; the deficiencies page covers that side.

The draft is built from what the tech captured, so a thin section usually means a thin capture. The fix is a call to the tech rather than a sentence you write on their behalf.

Fixing what the draft got wrong

The editor lays the units out by building, with each building's address shown over its group, so a site with two buildings on different streets reads to the customer the way the property reads to them. A site with no buildings just lists its equipment, and nothing forces a building onto a one-building property.

Date of service sits beside the closeout time, and they are separate fields on purpose. The draft fills the date of service with the day the shop completed the work, so most of the time it's already right. When a tech closes out Tuesday's visit on Wednesday morning, you change the date of service and the closeout time stays where it was, because the closeout is a shop fact and the date of service is what the customer reads.

A draft can carry a row that shouldn't be there. Sometimes a tech adds a failed thermostat as its own unit when it belongs to the RTU it hangs off, and sometimes a placeholder row that came in with imported data shows up as if it were equipment. Either way you can remove the row from the report, or attach it to the unit on that site it really belongs to. Removing a row only removes it from this report, and attaching a row to an existing unit doesn't delete anything either. Adding as a new unit is still there for the genuine case, where the tech found something on the roof the system had never heard of, and a thermostat hanging off an RTU isn't that case.

The tech's handoff note

Beside the report you'll see each tech's own handoff for the visit: who it's from, what they say the outcome was, their note, and when the office received it. If two techs contributed, each has their own. That handoff is for the shop and is not part of the customer document, and reading it doesn't draft, approve or send anything. It's there before all the captures have landed, too, which helps when a tech's photos are still on a phone in a basement and you want to know what to expect.

Sending it, and what happens to a sent PDF

Nothing reaches the customer until you send it. Once you've fixed what needs fixing, you send it, and the PDF that goes out is frozen as sent. If you move a unit to a different building afterwards, the preview in Office follows the current record, but the PDF the customer already has stays the way it went out.

When the draft never showed up

Once in a while the visit completes and the report doesn't come. Reports shows the visit as "Customer report not drafted" with a "Draft customer report" button rather than an empty draft. Press it. That requests only the report, so it doesn't complete the visit a second time or repeat anything the completion already did. If a draft had already been prepared or reviewed, including edits someone in the office made, the retry picks that up rather than starting over. The completed visit keeps track of whether a report is still owed.

Updated September 21, 2026.