Field-Ops Dispatch App
Replaced a whiteboard and a group chat with a mobile-first dispatch app — jobs, routes, photos, invoices, all in one place, working offline on site.
A 14-person electrical services team running a growing business on a literal whiteboard, three group chats, and a shared spreadsheet. They weren't losing jobs — yet — but they were losing time on every one of them.
The brief
Build the smallest possible application that replaces:
- The whiteboard (today's schedule)
- The three chats (customer updates, internal coordination, invoice admin)
- The spreadsheet (completed-job tracker)
Must work offline on a phone in a switchboard cupboard with no signal. Must not require training.
The build
A thin, opinionated Next.js app with a typed tRPC API, Postgres, and a service-worker cache for offline-first behaviour. Everything the field techs need on a phone lives on one screen at a time.
- Dispatch view — a drag-and-drop day plan with travel time factored in from Mapbox
- Job card — photos, notes, signed-off checklists, GPS-stamped completion
- Customer updates — automated "tech is 10 minutes out" texts via Resend + Twilio
- Invoicing — job costs roll straight into Xero via their API
Outcomes
- Dispatch time dropped from ~20 minutes a morning to under 8
- Invoices now go out same-day on 90% of jobs (up from 40%)
- The whiteboard is still on the wall, but it's just a weekly planning surface now — the real schedule lives in the app
Sixteen months in, they've added two techs and the system hasn't needed structural changes.