Work-order and planning app connected to Exact

35 technicians, 3 planners and around 600 work orders a week on carbon-copy paper. The slips came back to the office on Friday, sometimes the week after, often illegible and without material lines. The back office retyped everything into Exact Online and called technicians about missing hours. Invoices went out an average of 12 days after the job.

An industry package had been tried twice and dropped twice: too many screens, no offline mode in basements and meter cupboards, and a planner that did not fit emergency call-outs alongside project work. Management's requirement was clear: 1 app, works without coverage, and the work order is in Exact the same day.

We spent 2 days riding along with technicians and saw that a work order in practice consists of 5 actions: arrival, work, materials, photo, signature. The app had to do exactly those 5 steps, in that order, with big buttons for work gloves. We chose Flutter for iOS and Android from 1 codebase, with a local SQLite database that syncs as soon as coverage returns.

We built the Exact Online integration in NestJS as its own layer: orders and customers come in, approved work orders go back as invoice lines, materials are deducted from van stock. Planners schedule in a web version and push changes to the phone. Timeline: 2 weeks of design and data model, 4 weeks of building, 2 weeks of piloting with 6 technicians before the rest moved over.

A deliberate choice: no time tracking per minute, but per work order with start and end times. That was less precise than management first wanted, but the only thing technicians would fill in consistently. Data quality won over granularity.

Technicians see their day in the app, open a work order on arrival, scan materials with the camera, photograph the situation and have the customer sign on screen. The work order goes as a PDF to the customer and to the office, even when it was completed in a meter cupboard without coverage.

Planners drag call-outs between technicians based on location and skills, and see live which work orders are still open. Approved work orders are processed into invoices in Exact Online overnight. The back office now checks exceptions instead of retyping everything.