What Bolt does, and what it won't do on its own

Letting an assistant near the schedule and the customer list is a fair thing to be careful about, and if you're the one in the truck you mostly want to know what you can ask it. Bolt does ordinary work inside the shop when someone asks, reads back anything that leaves the shop or commits money and waits for your yes, and won't do a few things at all.

Where Bolt lives and what it knows

Bolt is the assistant inside Office and Field. You type to it or talk to it, and in Field a voice conversation keeps going with the phone locked in your pocket. It answers from the shop's own records: the schedule, customers, sites and their buildings, units and their history, open findings, stock, hours, and invoices with the payments against them. Ask what's open on the RTUs at a site and the answer is whatever your techs recorded there, not a guess about what a shop like yours probably has. The office can also ask how many hours anyone on the crew recorded, what a job earned and what it cost, and an administrator can ask for profit by customer, site, month or technician. Bolt says what the figure leaves out, like jobs not invoiced yet or hours with no cost rate. Ask what you've charged for a part, like an AX24 belt, and Bolt finds it however it was written on past quotes and invoices, newest first, with the last invoiced price and what your price book says.

It also reads each site's Getting in and Heads up, the notes your techs see at the top of every visit, so a tech at the gate can ask for the code and hear what the office or the last tech wrote, when it last worked, and whether the customer is on a do-not-service hold.

Bolt works as the person talking to it. A tech asking "what's my day" gets their own stops, and a manager can ask about the whole board. It can't reach anything the signed-in person couldn't reach on their own, and it checks that again at the moment it acts, which is why a conversation started this morning doesn't carry authority you lost at noon. The rules are the same whether the request was typed in Office or spoken in a mechanical room.

Work inside the shop happens when you ask

You can also connect another agent app to your shop through BoltWright's MCP connection. Follow the MCP setup instructions, add https://app.boltwright.com/mcp in the app, sign in to BoltWright, and choose read-only or read-and-write access. It gets only the records and tools your role permits. Read only cannot change records or approve proposals. With write access, the app can request ordinary internal changes, but before it confirms a customer message or anything else on the read-back list below, it has to show you the saved proposal and get your yes in a later message. Only connect an app you trust with your shop's information. You can disconnect it under Account & appearance in Office.

If you ask clearly for something that stays inside the shop, Bolt does it and tells you what it did. That covers things like saving a note or readings against a unit, adding or correcting a unit, recording stock you used, clocking in and out, adding time you forgot to record (even on a job that wasn't on your schedule that day), telling you where the rest of the crew is working and adding you to a teammate's job so you can help, starting a job, changing a job's type (service call, maintenance and the rest of your list) or marking it an emergency, starting a report draft or fixing one, drafting a quote or an invoice, keeping a part's price in the price book (administrators), adding a part found on site or changing a price on a job before it's invoiced, recording a supplier receipt or other expense on a job (or removing one entered by mistake) so job costing counts it, adding a note to a job (office only when you say so; it never goes on a report), fixing the words of a note a tech saved from the field (the person who wrote it, the office or the visit's lead can; photos and recordings stay as they were) or deleting one saved by mistake, which the office can put back, keeping the office's internal notes on a quote or invoice, logging a follow-up call on a quote, noting that you sent a quote or invoice yourself, starting a revision of a sent quote, re-issuing a quote from your old system in BoltWright, assigning or moving a visit, booking a return visit, marking someone's time away, setting up a customer or a job, adding another building or site to a customer you already have, updating a customer's phone or email or adding and removing their contacts, and changing a site's Getting in or Heads up. If someone changed those notes since Bolt read them, a tech's change waits for the office with both versions kept, so nobody's code gets quietly replaced. A tech's note works the same way: if someone fixed it after Bolt read it, Bolt reads you the new words instead of saving over them. A report that already went to the customer stays as sent, and the office is told the note changed. A manager can also put a customer on a do-not-service hold or lift it; a hold warns whoever books work there and never blocks it. Move a visit and give it to someone else in the same breath and it's one change, so the tech hears about it once, with the final day and time. If that tech is away, off that day, or the time runs outside their normal hours, Bolt tells you before it changes anything and waits for you to say go ahead. If a move wasn't what you meant, ask Bolt to undo the last change. Bolt can't move a visit that came in from an imported schedule.

Bolt can also finish a visit on a clear request, once the crew has left and their notes have reached the office. Say you're done and heading out, and it saves what you said about the work as a note on the visit, stops your time on that stop, which records you leaving, then finishes it. Tell it about one unit, like a bearing still noisy on RTU-2, and that goes on RTU-2 for the report. A line like "all four units PMd" stays one note on the visit in your words, so the office can see it was said for all of them at once. If nothing you saved has reached the office yet, it says so and offers to take the note now. A manager closing a visit on someone else's behalf is different, and so is a finish that would text the customer, which are both in the next section.

The office can review and change a draft’s Canadian GST, HST, PST or QST treatment, including line exemptions. An administrator sets the defaults for new drafts. Choose the taxes you collect for that work; Bolt does not decide exemptions from the province alone. For US invoices, QuickBooks calculates sales tax before you approve the amount.

Managers can also ask Bolt to correct or void a completed crew time entry, with a reason, or to add time someone forgot to record. Bolt reads back whose time it is, when, the job and the reason, and adds it only after the manager says yes. Bolt uses the same recorded-hours ledger as Office, so the technician and office can see who changed it, when, why, and the before and after. Running timers and saved CSV snapshots stay untouched. Ask who changed a tech's note and Bolt reads you its history: who changed it, when, from where, and what it said before.

Anything that leaves the shop gets read back first

Some things leave the shop, commit money, or change what a customer expects. For those, Bolt prepares the exact thing, reads it back to you, and does it only once you've said yes to that read-back. That list covers:

• texting a customer
• sending a report, quote, invoice or payment reminder
• approving a quote or an invoice, recording a payment or marking an invoice paid, or voiding one
• cancelling or postponing a visit (one, or many at once when clearing out the unscheduled list), setting old work aside as not dispatch work, or changing a maintenance agreement
• cancelling a whole job, closing one the techs didn't finish in Field, moving one to the right customer or site, or removing one made by mistake, which also asks whether its hours are voided or kept
• moving a unit to another site, which takes its open findings along
• taking a unit off a site's list because it was removed, which also takes it off any report you haven't sent
• generating a season of maintenance visits at once
• texting or nudging a tech, closing a tech's visit from the office, or reopening a finished one
• pushing a quote to another system
• creating a non-posting QuickBooks estimate to calculate US sales tax, recovering an uncertain estimate, or posting an approved invoice to QuickBooks

There's no magic word. Your own words in context are the yes, and you can ask a question in the middle. What you can't do is say yes to something other than what was read back. If the record changed underneath the proposal while you were thinking, Bolt tells you what changed and prepares it again rather than sending the old version. When a manager closes a job, or closes or reopens a visit, through Bolt, the reason on the record has to be the manager's own words, and Bolt won't write one for them.

If your shop has set an amount that needs approval, a quote or invoice over it waits for an administrator. Bolt says so and stops, and an administrator approves and sends it from Office.

A draft and a sent document are separate steps on purpose. A draft report or quote can be changed and sending it can't be taken back, so Bolt will make a clear edit to the draft right away and then stop and ask before it goes anywhere.

Working the phone itself

In Field, every message to Bolt carries the stop and route day you have open, so "this unit" or "my next stop" means what's on your screen. Opening a stop, getting directions, calling a contact and starting or stopping GPS hours stay with the buttons on the phone; Bolt doesn't press them for you. Starting GPS hours opens a consent screen in Timesheet, and nothing runs until you've finished that and the phone's own permission prompt.

Answering your phone line and website

If your shop uses the service desk, Bolt also answers your service line and the chat on your website. There it takes a service request: it asks what's wrong, where, and who to call back, and as soon as it has that it sends the request to your office without asking permission first. On the website the visitor sees "Sent to the office" with a reference number. Then it reads the request back and asks if there's anything to add, and anything the caller adds or corrects updates the same request, which your queue marks Updated after sending. When a caller's number belongs to one of your customer's contacts, Bolt opens with "Is this Dana?" instead of making them introduce themselves, confirms the building rather than asking where, and the request lands in your queue with that customer and site already picked. If it's someone else, Bolt drops the guess and carries on, and it never tells a caller anything on file beyond names. It doesn't book anyone or promise a time. After hours it follows your shop's rule in Service desk > Setup: by default it takes a message for everyday calls and tells the caller when the office opens, and when a caller's problem is an emergency the way your shop describes one, Bolt says why it sounds urgent and asks whether they want to be put through to whoever's on call; if they'd rather wait, it stays flagged urgent for a callback. Bolt never puts a caller through who didn't ask or agree, and when someone asks for a person, what they've told Bolt so far goes with the transfer. If someone describes danger happening right now, like a gas smell, smoke or a carbon monoxide alarm going off, Bolt tells them first to get everyone out and call 911, then carries on; everyday talk about gas furnaces or flame sensors doesn't set that off. It only says your on-call people are being texted when your shop has texting turned on and on-call contacts listed. Bolt tells every caller the call is recorded, and your office can play the call back on its request.

If something goes wrong on our side, nobody gets a dead line. A call Bolt can't take rings your fallback number or asks the caller to leave a message, and the website says so, with a Try again button and your office phone and email if they're in its snippet, instead of disappearing.

What it won't do

Trial shops share a daily AI allowance for imports, chat and live voice. If it is used up, Bolt pauses until it resets at midnight UTC. Your saved records and Field capture still work.

Bolt won't act on a stop it can't identify, won't invent a GPS location, and won't send anything to a customer without the read-back. It also won't hold a conversation without a connection. Field says Bolt needs a connection and keeps your message from going anywhere, while notes, photos, readings and voice notes carry on saving to the phone.

If the connection drops in the middle of a request, Bolt doesn't quietly try again. It tells you it lost the reply or couldn't reach the office. Check the record before you ask again, so nothing gets done twice.

Updated October 23, 2026.