Working From the Van

What the phone has to do

For a lot of trades the phone is the whole office. It answers calls, holds the diary, takes photographs, writes quotes, sends invoices, takes payment, and reaches every file the business owns.

That is a lot to depend on a device that lives in a pocket on a building site.

Which makes two things worth attention: setting it up so it can actually do all of that, and making sure losing it is an inconvenience rather than a disaster.

The setup worth doing once

• Files in cloud storage, so anything on the office computer is reachable.
• Quoting and invoicing on the phone, not only on a desktop.
• A payment method, a link or a card reader.
• The diary synced, so what you book on site appears everywhere.
• Photographs filed to the job, rather than accumulating in a camera roll.
• Business calls separated, so you know what you are answering.

The fifth is the one most often skipped and the one that causes most administrative pain later, when a job needs its photographs and they are somewhere among eleven thousand images.

Quoting on site

The single highest-value thing to get working.

A quote produced and sent before leaving the driveway wins work that a quote sent three evenings later does not, for the same reason that replying fast wins generally.

What makes it possible: templates set up in advance, standard prices stored, and a process that takes ten minutes rather than an hour.

It does not have to be the final detailed quote. A one-page summary with a figure and what is included, sent immediately, followed by the detail if needed, captures the moment without pretending to precision you do not have.

A worked example

An electrician quoting in the evenings, typically two or three days after each visit.

He estimated he was winning about a third of what he quoted.

He set up a quoting app with his standard rates and common job templates, and began sending quotes from the van before driving away.

The quotes were less detailed than his evening ones. His conversion went to over half.

His analysis was that customers had frequently accepted somebody else's quote before his arrived, and that the detail he had been adding was mostly for his own comfort rather than anything the customer read.

He also recovered several evenings a week, which had a value of its own.

Signal, and working without it

The constraint that undermines all of this.

Basements, plant rooms, rural sites and industrial buildings all have poor coverage, and cloud tools are frequently unusable without it.

What to check before relying on something: whether it works offline and syncs later, or whether it simply stops.

Practical measures: download the day's job details in the morning while you have signal, keep key documents available offline, and have a paper fallback for anything you cannot afford to be without.

Tethering from a phone with a different network to the one on your tablet is a cheap second option in areas where one carrier is poor.

The counter-case

Where doing everything on site is the wrong instinct.

Complex quotes that need thought, checking, or a supplier's price. Rushing those on a phone produces errors, and an error in a quote is expensive.

Anything requiring concentration on a screen too small for it, such as reviewing a specification or a drawing.

And anything where the customer is standing beside you, where typing at them is worse than saying you will send it within the hour.

The useful split is capturing everything on site and producing the considered output later, rather than either extreme.

Losing the phone

Worth planning for, because it is the single point of failure.

A screen lock and remote wipe enabled. Everything backed up, so a replacement can be restored rather than rebuilt.

Two-factor codes that are not only on that phone, because a lost phone that is also your only authentication method locks you out of everything at once.

And a written note of the accounts the business depends on, kept somewhere else, which is the same record that covers the domain and hosting.

Getting the data plan right

An ordinary running cost that is frequently wrong in both directions.

Working from the van means uploading photographs, syncing files and occasionally tethering a laptop. That is more data than a personal plan usually assumes.

Running out mid-month means the phone throttles or stops, which takes the diary and the payments with it at exactly the wrong moment.

The opposite error is paying for an unlimited plan while using very little, which some trades do out of caution.

Check what you actually used over three months and buy for that plus a margin. It is a five-minute review that most people have never done.

The physical side

Unglamorous and it is what actually fails.

A charger in the van and a battery pack, because a phone that dies at two in the afternoon takes the diary and the payments with it.

A case that survives being dropped on concrete, and a screen protector, because a cracked screen on a Friday is a week of inconvenience.

And a mount, so navigation and calls do not involve holding it.

None of that is interesting and all of it together costs less than a single lost day of work.

What to keep off the phone

Worth deciding, because not everything belongs on a device that lives on a building site.

Customer card details, obviously, which should never be on any device of yours.

Anything you would not want read by somebody who picked the phone up: personal information about customers, staff details, or documents belonging to a client.

The practical position is that anything sensitive lives in an app requiring its own login, rather than in photographs, notes or messages that are visible to anybody who unlocks the screen.

That is not paranoia. Phones get left in vans, on roofs and in customers' kitchens, and the person who finds it is usually helpful and occasionally not.

Keeping the admin from accumulating

The habit that separates working from the van from drowning in it.

Do the small things immediately: file the photographs to the job, send the invoice, note what materials were used, while you are still parked outside.

Five minutes per job at the time is considerably less than the hour on Sunday evening spent trying to reconstruct an entire week from memory.

The tools make that possible. Whether it happens is a habit, and it is the habit that decides whether the phone is an office or a source of guilt.

Keeping the accounts all of this depends on reachable by somebody other than you is covered in who holds the keys to your site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.