Keep working when you lose signal

The field app keeps working when you lose signal — a basement, a rural job site, a dead zone on the highway. Changes you make offline are saved right on your phone and sent to the office automatically the next time you're back online. You don't need to do anything to turn this on, and you don't need to wait for a signal to keep working a job.

What's saved offline

Anything you'd normally submit from a job — advancing a work order's status, clocking in or out, logging parts and readings, capturing a signature, adding a photo, or flagging a deficiency — is saved to your phone the moment you submit it, signal or not. It's held there until the app can reach the server, then sent automatically. Nothing you submit offline is ever lost by losing signal.

Queued photos count against a per-device cap (about 40MB, roughly 20 photos at once). If you hit it, the app tells you plainly — reconnect and let the pending photos sync before shooting more.

Reading the sync chip

A small status chip lives in the header of every screen in the field app. It tells you, at a glance, whether your work has reached the office:

Online — you're connected and nothing is waiting.
Offline — no connection right now. Whatever you submit is saved and will send once you're back online.
Syncing — you're back online and the app is sending what built up while you were offline.
Sync issue — something you submitted came back with an error (not just a dropped connection). It needs a decision from you — see below.

Tap the chip any time to open the Sync Center, the full list of what's queued.

The Sync Center

Open the sync chip from any screen to reach the Sync Center (/tech/sync) — the complete list of what's saved on your phone and where it stands:

Queued — saved offline, waiting to send. No action needed; it sends on its own once you're connected.
Failed — sent, but the office rejected it (not just a bad connection — an actual problem with the change, like a job that was already closed by someone else). A failed item is held here until you decide what to do with it; it's never silently retried in a loop and never silently dropped.

For a failed item you have two choices:

Retry — try sending it again, once you've sorted out whatever caused the rejection.
Discard — drop it for good if it no longer applies.

When everything has synced, the Sync Center just tells you so — nothing waiting.

Shared or borrowed phones

The queue only ever shows and syncs work saved under your own sign-in. If a queued change can't be confirmed as belonging to whoever's signed in right now — it was saved by a different tech on a shared device, or from before this device started tracking whose work is whose — it's held separately as Quarantined instead of being synced or lost. A quarantined item is never sent automatically; it just sits there until the person it actually belongs to signs in and reviews it, or someone discards it.

What this isn't

This is a save-and-retry queue for your own submissions, not a full offline copy of the app. You still need a connection to load a job you haven't opened yet, see today's schedule update, or pull up anything you haven't already viewed. Plan ahead on a job you know will be in a dead zone: open it, review what you need, and start working — from there, your submissions are covered.