Running Scheduling, Inspections, and Defects

Use Scheduler as the office control desk

1. Keep planning work in Scheduler instead of spreading assignment state across calendar invites, notes, or chat.
2. Review backlog, draft work, and deployed work separately so engineers only inherit clean instructions.
3. Use map and timeline views when location or route pressure matters more than a simple list.
4. Keep office-only members out of live assignee lanes unless you intentionally enable field work for them.

Use target month when the month matters more than the day

1. Choose Target month for inspections or work orders that must happen in a specific month but do not yet have a real booked day.
2. Use this instead of putting a fake visit on the last day of the month.
3. Expect month-planned rows to render as Planned for Apr 2026 rather than as a made-up date.
4. Keep month-planned work in draft planning state until the office picks a real slot.
5. Once the team drags the job onto a day, bulk schedules it, or assigns a real visit date, the record should move back to Exact date.

Schedule the visit before the exact system is known

1. Create the inspection from the site even when the real installation has not been confirmed yet.
2. Leave the inspection without a system when the building is new, partially commissioned, or only the field engineer can verify what is actually installed.
3. Treat System pending as a valid planning state, not as a blocker.
4. Remember that the inspection still ends up bound to one real system. This workflow only delays that binding until the visit.
5. Use this path for uncertainty, not for mixed-scope work. If two different systems need inspection, create two inspections.

Review inspections as execution returns

1. Open the inspection workspace when field records begin to come back.
2. If the row shows System pending, the visit can still be underway, but checklist, asset, certificate, and sign-off actions stay locked until the engineer binds the real system.
3. Check visit notes, checklist results, and defect detail together before deciding whether the job is complete.
4. Use the planned-date filters when you need to review upcoming planned work by scheduling intent; keep the older date filters for historical or completion-oriented review.
5. Use the visit-note history to understand what changed during the visit instead of relying only on the latest certificate.

Treat defects as a queue, not just evidence

1. Review defects by severity, age, and commercial significance.
2. Confirm photos, annotations, and visit notes explain the problem clearly enough for review outside the site.
3. Decide whether the follow-up should remain operational, become a quote, or move straight into a work order.

Use feature availability notes correctly

1. If quote, work-order, analytics, or AI-assisted actions do not appear, check feature availability before escalating it as a workflow failure.
2. Keep the operational state current even when a downstream commercial desk is not enabled in that workspace.

Troubleshooting

Reference surfaces

1. Use Scheduling, Inspections, and Defects for route-level controls, filters, and handoffs.
2. Use Map when the same work is being triaged spatially instead of from the queue.
3. Use the Admin-to-Engineer Handoff Map when you need to see exactly how office planning becomes field execution and then returns for review.