Understanding the General Fieldworker

The general fieldworker is a core user that is added to your account by default and can’t be deleted. 

The email address for the general fieldworker must always remain as your main business email address, which you use to contact your customers, and can only be edited from your business details page under your company settings, by editing the primary email address for your business. 

If both your admin user and general fieldworker user use the same email address and password, you will be prompted to select between them when logging into the app. You will also be able to easily switch between them while logged in, by clicking on the three dots in the top right corner in the app and pressing the Switch User option. Please note that this option is only available if both users have identical login credentials.

The way the general fieldworker is used depends on the size of your team and differs widely if you are an owner operator from if you have a team of fieldworkers added to your account.

Using the general fieldworker user for owner operators

If you are an owner operator where you are the only fieldworker in your business, and you do your own admin work and attend your own bookings, then your general fieldworker user will be used as your business calendar and will reflect your business availability, and all your quotes and bookings will be assigned to your general fieldworker. The availability of your general fieldworker will be taken into consideration if the real time availability feature is enabled, as it will be considered your overall business availability.

As an owner operator, when you need to perform fieldworker duties like sending On The Way messages to customers, checking in and out of jobs, completing forms, uploading photos, and taking payments, you should be logged into the app as a fieldworker, instead of being logged in as an admin, and can switch back to the admin role to perform admin duties like account management, customer management, lead management, feedback management, and accessing your account settings. You can switch between admin and fieldworker roles easily by clicking on the three dots in the top right corner in the app, then pressing the Switch User link, you can also select between them when logging into your account, as long as they both have the same login details.

If you have an additional person in your team attending your bookings, then you must add them as an additional fieldworker instead of getting them to login as your general fieldworker, as you wouldn’t want them having access to your customers, quotes, invoices, payments, and other information that might not be related to their work.

Using the general fieldworker for established businesses that have at least one extra fieldworker

If you run a team of fieldworkers, then your general fieldworker acts as the default office calendar that holds all quotes and bookings which are not assigned to a specific fieldworker. You only need to login as an admin user in this case, and probably don’t need to ever login as a general fieldworker. Your fieldworkers should all have their own user accounts, and should login to the app as fieldworkers to manage their day to day duties with your business.

When you have additional fieldworkers added to your account, the standard business working hours set in your general fieldworker’s profile will determine the available time slots your customers can book your services for via your customer portal. Your admin/office users can schedule appointments outside your set business hours, and are not restricted by the hours set in your general fieldworker profile, or by the real availability of your fieldworkers.

If you have the real time availability feature enabled in your customer portal settings, OctopusPro will check the working hours and calendar availability of each of your fieldworkers, and will only allow your customer to place bookings for time slots when there is at least one matching fieldworker available for the booking. The time slots available will always be limited by the business working hours set in your general fieldworker profile. For example, if your business hours are 8:00am to 6:00pm, your customers won’t be able to schedule appointments for 8pm, even if you have fieldworkers available at that time.

If you want to allow your customers to book appointments anytime regardless of the availability of your fieldworkers, you can disable the real time availability feature, which will allow your customers to schedule appointments anytime without taking the availability and the working hours of your fieldworkers into account. However, your customers will still be restricted by your overall business working hours set in your general fieldworker profile.

Disabling the real time availability feature will allow your customers to double book your fieldworkers, so it’s important that you manually confirm and organize bookings if you have disabled this feature in your account settings.