Assign jobs to team instead of specific technician?

Question

We're running 3 HVAC crews and 2 electrical crews. Right now I'm assigning jobs to individual technicians, but when someone calls out sick I have to manually reshuffle 4-5 jobs before 7 AM. My team leads tell me who they want on their crew that day — I just need to assign the job to "HVAC Crew A" and let them figure out who actually goes.

Is there a way to assign to a team/crew instead of a named technician? We need this working by January or we're going to have problems scaling.

Priya Nair (Staff) · Accepted Answer

Hi Brandon! Great question — this comes up a lot with growing field teams. FieldPulse doesn't have a native "team" entity, but there are two solid patterns that achieve what you're after:

Option 1: Technician Groups (Recommended)

Create a "placeholder" technician for each crew — e.g., "HVAC Crew A - Lead"
Assign jobs to that placeholder
Your actual crew members check the mobile app using that login, or you reassign to the specific tech once they know who's going

Option 2: Custom Field + Dispatch View Filter

Add a custom dropdown field on work orders called "Assigned Crew" with your values
Use the dispatch board filters to show only jobs tagged to each crew
Assign to the final technician at dispatch time

Option 1 is cleaner for your use case since it lets crew leads see jobs immediately. See this article for full steps on setting up technician groups.

Happy to help if you want to walk through either approach!

Josh Mercer · Answer

We've been doing the placeholder tech thing for 2 years now. Pro tip: name them something like "HVAC-A-CREW" so they sort to the top of your tech list and you don't have to scroll past individual names to find them.

Also — make sure your crew leads actually have the mobile login for their placeholder. Had a guy show up to a job once because he got an SMS notification but couldn't open the work order details since he was logged into his own account, not the crew account. Lesson learned.

Gwen Albright · Answer

I'll add a third option since I've tried both of the above — we ended up creating actual user accounts for our crew leads and making them "Managers" with permission to reassign jobs to their own crew members. Takes more setup upfront but eliminates the login sharing headaches and gives you better audit trails.

Downside: more licenses. Upside: when something goes wrong you know exactly who made the change.

Also worth noting — there's a feature request for native team-based assignment in the product roadmap discussions. Might be worth upvoting if you see it.