A crew ran a directional-drilling bore for a utility install — a routine job for a field-services contractor: locate, set up, drill, record, backfill, prove. Nothing unusual happened. And that's exactly the point.
The problem was never the work. It was the record of it.
By knock-off, the evidence of that day lived everywhere except where the business needed it:
- Progress photos on the operator's phone, never named or filed.
- Bore-log readings — depth, inclination, azimuth — scribbled on a docket.
- A ground-condition issue mid-bore, mentioned verbally, recorded nowhere.
- Asset IDs and the works order photographed, but never linked to anything.
At invoice time, the admin chases the crew for proof. At audit time, the safety record is a guess. And if the client disputes completion, it's someone's word against a shoebox of photos.
This crew is not unusual. Across field service, Salesforce's State of Service research finds the average technician now spends 30% of their hours on admin— slightly more than the 29% they spend actually delivering the work — with mobile workers estimating around seven hours a week lost to filling in forms and hunting for information. The record isn't a small tax on the job. It's becoming the job.
What changed
The crew did exactly the same job. The difference is that this time it was captured as a structured record, automatically, as the work happened:
- Every photo GPS-stamped, time-stamped, and pinned to the asset on the plan it belongs to.
- Bore-log readings captured as machine-readable data — the whole bore reconstructed as a profile.
- The ground-condition exception flagged in real time, with severity and location, on the record — not in someone's memory.
- Asset IDs and the works-order reference read straight off the plates in the photos.
- A completion pack — job record, safety evidence, cost lines — written by the system and ready to send.
Before and after
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| End-of-day paperwork and a phone-photo hunt | Nothing to write up — it wrote itself |
| “Did we do the safety checks?” | Time-stamped, GPS-verified evidence, one click |
| Billing evidence scattered | Labour, plant and materials against the job |
| Dispute = word vs. shoebox | Dispute = here's the plan-linked record |
The point
The crew shouldn't have to choose between doing the work and documenting it. When capture happens in the flow of the job, the record is a by-product of the work — not a second job waiting at the end of the day.
Your crew runs the job. FieldTaskora writes the report.
Sources
- Salesforce, State of Service — field technicians spend ~30% of working hours on admin, more than the 29% spent delivering service.