BizzMate for phones is here

The office has had BizzMate for a while. The people doing the work have had a phone browser and a lot of pinching to zoom. That's finished: there's now a real app, on Android and iOS, built for one hand in a van.

What a technician actually gets

It opens on today's run — the jobs booked for today, in order, in the organisation's timezone rather than the handset's. That last part sounds pedantic until someone's phone is set to a different state and every booking reads an hour out.

From there:

• The job — what the work is, where, who the customer is, and the history of everything that's happened to it
• Checklists — tick the steps as you go; required steps block sign-off until they're done
• Materials — add what went in, remove what you mistyped
• Photos — before, during and after, straight onto the job record
• Sign-off — the completion report and the customer's signature, on site
• The run on a map — real drive times between stops, with a deep link into Google Maps for the next one

It keeps working when the signal doesn't

Half the jobs in this industry happen in a basement, a plant room or a rural block with one bar. An app that fails there fails at the exact moment it's needed.

So the writes that happen on site — ticking a step, adding a material, uploading a photo, moving a job — are queued on the phone when the request can't get out, and sent when the signal comes back. The banner tells you what's waiting, by name: "Ticked Pressure test", not "1 change pending".

Talking to the office without ringing them

Three things landed with the app that close the loop between the van and the desk:

• Comments on a job — a note back to the office that isn't a phone call. Every role has this, including hired suppliers.
• Extra work found on site — raise a variation from the job in about thirty seconds, and the office is notified immediately rather than on Friday.
• Fixing the site address — the person standing at the wrong house is the one who knows. They can correct it now instead of ringing someone who'll type it for them.

What each role can see is the server's decision

The app doesn't work out permissions from a job title. It's handed a capability table when you sign in and hides what that table says to hide, so the phone and the web can't drift apart.

In practice: a technician sees their own jobs and the customer's number. A hired supplier sees the job they were engaged for, the discussion and their own bills — never the customer book, never the business's money. That's the same rule the web app enforces, applied in the same place.

One handset, one key

Each device gets its own access token rather than sharing an account. A lost phone can be identified in the profile screen and revoked on its own, without signing the tablet in the office out at the same time.

What isn't in it yet

Push notifications. The app refreshes when you bring it back to the foreground, and the notification centre is there — but nothing buzzes in your pocket yet. That needs infrastructure on our side rather than code, and we'd rather say so than let you find out at 2am when the urgent job you were expecting to be told about wasn't.

You can still control what reaches you: notification preferences and quiet hours are in the app, so the settings are ready when the notifications are.

Getting it

It's the same account you already have — sign in with your BizzMate email and password and your organisation comes with you. If you're not on BizzMate yet, start a free trial and the app comes with it.