Working with no signal

Most of the places you work don't have reception. Mechanical rooms are concrete boxes, and basements are basements. So we built Field on the assumption that you don't have a connection, and treat having one as the bonus.

The phone gets ready while it still has signal

When Field has a connection, it downloads what it thinks you'll need for the next while: your route, the site and access instructions for each stop, what the work order asks for, the units at that site with their recent history and any open findings, and whatever reference files the office attached. That's what you'll have in the basement. It isn't the building's whole life story, just the recent part, and it won't include a stop the office hadn't sent yet when you lost signal. If you know you're heading somewhere bad, it's worth opening the stop in the truck first.

Everything you do on site saves to the phone first

Notes, readings, photos, voice notes, adding a unit that isn't in the system, fixing a serial number that's wrong, answering a finding, recording that you arrived or left, your own hours, your handoff at the end. All of it writes to the phone before the app tells you it's saved, and it's still there after a restart or a dead battery. When you move to another screen, the note you just typed is already on it. There's no separate offline mode to switch on.

The one that catches people is voice notes. The recording is safe the moment you stop, but turning it into text happens on our side, so you'll see the audio and no words until you're back in range. That's normal, not a lost note.

If dispatch sends you somewhere the phone never prepared, you can still take notes and photos. They save as unassigned work, and later you tell the app which visit and unit they belong to. It won't guess from your location or from a unit label it's seen before, because guessing wrong is worse than asking.

What has to wait

A few things need a connection: a live conversation with Bolt, turning a voice note into text, searching for anything the phone didn't prepare, signing in fresh, schedule changes in either direction, sending anything to a customer or anything to do with money, and setting up a new customer, job or schedule from scratch. If you type something to Bolt while you're offline, it just sits there as an unsent message. Nobody has agreed to anything.

When you get signal back

Field uploads on its own, in order, while the app is open. You don't have to tap anything. Each item goes up once under the identity it got on the phone, so a retry after a dropped connection doesn't hand the office a second copy. Things that depend on other things wait their turn, which is why your completion request won't go until the photos and times it counts on have landed. The app will also try in the background when the phone lets it, but the promise we'll stand behind is simpler than that: open the app and it picks up where it left off.

The queue shows what's still on the phone and where each item is at: waiting, uploading, received by the office, or needs attention. Needs attention means the office couldn't take it as-is, usually because someone changed the record while you were out. The phone keeps your version and theirs side by side, and you decide. Nothing gets thrown away on its own.

One distinction worth keeping in your head. "Saved on this phone" and "received by the office" are different things, and the app shows them separately on purpose. The office can't see anything until it says received. If your manager is building a report off your visit, that's the word they're waiting for.

Odds and ends

If your sign-in expires while you're out, the app keeps your work and keeps you in. Uploads and Bolt pause until you sign in again as yourself. Signing out is the one thing that does remove work from the phone, so the app tells you how much is still unsent and defaults to not doing it. Don't sign out to fix a sync problem.

If the phone runs out of storage, you get an error when you try to save rather than a saved mark it can't back up. Same idea if the app crashes in the middle of a voice note: you get a recoverable draft, or a clear message that it didn't make it, and never a note that claims to be saved and isn't.

And if you're back on a good connection and the queue hasn't moved in a while, call the office and tell them what's on the phone. They can't see it yet, and they'd rather know.

Updated September 21, 2026.