Finding the parts the truck says it still has
Truck replenishment works off materials used on invoices. A capacitor swapped at four in the afternoon and never added to the invoice is invisible to the system, so the replenishment order is short and the count is wrong. Two lists exist already. One is what the inventory location believes, and the other is what receipts and adjustments say should be there. The variance between them is computable nightly, per truck, and the interesting output is not the total but the item that goes missing on the same van every month.
The technician photographs the nameplate, then types the model and serial from that photo, usually somewhere with bad light and worse signal.
A field services business is judged on the gap between a customer calling and a technician arriving with the right part. Most of the repeated office work exists to close that gap: booking, dispatching, looking up whether a unit is still under warranty, and finding out what the last technician did.
- ServiceTitan
- Excel
- QuickBooks Online
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if you run a van stock of consumables and buy everything else as a non stock item against the job, because then the truck is not pretending to hold anything and the variance report has nothing to report. Counting matters when the truck carries real value.
The constraint that shapes it
Licensing is issued by state and often by municipality, per trade, which means not every technician can legally perform every job in every jurisdiction. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- Why does ServiceTitan think a part is on the truck when it is not?
- How do I audit truck stock without shutting down for a count?
- How do I catch parts used but never added to an invoice?
- What causes truck replenishment purchase orders to come up short?
- How often should service vans get an inventory count?
Back to field services, or see how this is priced and scoped.