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How do you handle jobs that need multiple visits?

Gwen Albright

We've got a growing number of jobs that span 2–4 visits over a week or two — think system installations with staging, rough-in, then final commissioning. Right now we're creating separate work orders for each phase, but I'm wondering if there's a cleaner way.

The pain points I'm seeing:

  • Customers getting multiple appointment confirmations for "the same job"
  • Techs showing up without context from previous visits (photos, notes buried in older WOs)
  • Dispatched as separate jobs, so we're not seeing the true capacity load
  • Billing gets fragmented — sometimes we invoice per visit, sometimes at completion

I've experimented with using a single work order and just scheduling multiple appointments, but that gets messy when phases get delayed or rescheduled. What's actually working for your teams?

Would love to hear how you're structuring these — whether it's parent/child work orders, custom statuses, or just better handoff protocols. We're on FieldPulse 3.2 if that matters.

Parents

  • In my experience the single-WO approach falls apart when phases stretch past 30 days. We've had jobs sit open for two months waiting on permits or inspections — clutters up every report, skews your completion metrics.

    We use parent/child WOs now. Parent stays open until final signoff, children are the individual visits. More overhead but at least you can close and invoice per phase without losing the thread.

    Downside: FieldPulse doesn't have true parent/child linking, so we're using a custom field for parent WO number. Not elegant but it works.

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  • In my experience the single-WO approach falls apart when phases stretch past 30 days. We've had jobs sit open for two months waiting on permits or inspections — clutters up every report, skews your completion metrics.

    We use parent/child WOs now. Parent stays open until final signoff, children are the individual visits. More overhead but at least you can close and invoice per phase without losing the thread.

    Downside: FieldPulse doesn't have true parent/child linking, so we're using a custom field for parent WO number. Not elegant but it works.

Children
  • in reply to Art Kowalczyk

    Another way to think about it — and this depends on whether your billing model is milestone-based or time-and-materials — is using service agreements for the overall project container, with individual work orders underneath. From a reporting standpoint, this gives you both granular visit data and project-level visibility.

    The tradeoff, as Art notes, is additional administrative overhead. We've found it worthwhile for projects exceeding $15K or spanning more than six weeks.