This is video 3 in my Field Nation series where I go into detail on what assigned Field Nation tickets look like, what the different parts of the work order look like, understanding deliverables, and closing out the tickets to maximize your pay.
I have performed Field Nation alternative client jobs in the freelance IT tech industry since 2000, on Field Nation since 2010, and on Work Market since 2011. Field Tech Academy wants to give you the secrets of 20+ years of experience how you can succeed as an Independent IT Field Tech.
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Video Transcript:
This is Michael with Field Tech Academy. This video is part of a series. Video one was on introducing you to the platform and the very basics of the layout of the platform. Video two was explaining how to actually go in and request and bid on tickets and counteroffer on tickets. This video is going to be on what you do once you have the ticket assigned to you. From the assignment phase, all the way through the completion phase.
Let’s get into it.
In my second video, I talked about the first four tabs here on the left, which are all in the “before you get assigned” stage. When you are requesting the ticket, when you’re making counter offers to try to get the ticket. This video is talking about the three tabs here for assigned, for pending, and completed. Assigned tickets are obviously tickets that have been assigned to you.
Pending tickets are tickets where you have actually completed the work, and you’re simply waiting for the buyer to click the final button for approval so you can get the money into your Field Nation profile. The completed tab will show you your full ticket history for all tickets that have been closed and paid. Let’s talk about when a Field Nation ticket gets assigned to you, what it looks like, and what are the important things for you to pay attention to.
You’re going to get an email or a text message depending on what you’ve set up in your profile. That’ll notify you that a ticket has been assigned to you. When you log in to your Field Nation account, you’ll see an assigned tab. This is actually a good opportunity to show you something that is called a bundle of work orders.
A bundle is where you get routed two or more tickets that are all together, and you take all of them, or you take none of them. You cannot cherry pick out of them. If you get assigned to it, then you are responsible to do all the tickets in that bundle. These three tickets here are an example of a bundle of tickets that I picked up.
Three tickets, three consecutive days. Let’s look at what an assigned ticket looks like and what some of the requirements would be. Anytime you’re assigned a job, you want to read the scope of work and look at all the attachments and make sure you understand what you’re doing before the date of the job so that you can be prepared.
You want to make sure you have all the tools, and all the supplies, and anything else that you might need so that you can do the job right. At the top here we see a description. Key things to look at on an assigned ticket. This is the ticket number. This is going to be your time frame. Behind the blur here is the address of the location which obviously I’m protecting from public use.
Over here is going to be a contact which may or may not be the actual site contact. It could be a ticket contact like a ticket manager, things like that. You’re going to have buttons over here that are important. You’re going to notice that this button currently says confirm. This button can actually say three different things and it changes depending on the status of the ticket.
Right now it is in confirm stage. I cannot confirm this ticket until I’m about 24 hours out. Once I click confirm, it may change to “check in”. In some cases, some of the buyers, because again, Field Nation buyers and the platform is very flexible. They can set different parameters based on what their desires are for the platform. This button may have the option, after hitting “confirm”, to go to “mark on my way”.
That is something where you would click that in theory, when you’re leaving your house so that they know that you’re enroute to the site so they don’t have to call you and text you and say, hey, are you going to be on time? And you go, are you going to show up to our job? Then once you’ve hit “Mark on your way”, this blue button will then change to the option to “check in”.
Once you’ve “checked in”, then the next phase of the blue button will be “check out”. As we scroll down, you’ll see that the buyer is Datamax Services. Regarding the pay, you will see that it is a blended pay rate. That means that I’m going to get paid $125 for the first 2.5 hours. After the first 2.5 hours, I will be paid $50 an hour for up to another hour.
In theory, the service fees are going to be $12.50 based on the minimum pay rate of $125. If I actually end up maxing out the budget of $175, then my fee would be $17.50. Another thing that’s good to note on the pay side is that this buyer has set up zero day terms. What that means is once they approve it, the money is going to go into your Field Nation account immediately.
It does show that they may take up to seven days to actually do the approval. The buyers are still going to have to look through the ticket, talk to their client, make sure their client satisfied that everything is still working and everything is good. So it may take a couple of days for them to actually review it and to know that everything’s good.
But once they do, click the button on their side to approve it, bam! The money’s going to show up in your Field Nation pending account. Later in the video, we’ll talk a little more details about pay and time frames and things like that. Scrolling further down, we’re going to see the service description area. They want you to read all this stuff, and a lot of times this stuff is just templates that they put on every single ticket.
So it may not apply to this particular job as much. Obviously, if you’ve never done a service call for them, you need to read this. You kind of understand their basic process, things like when you get on site, you got to check in. You must do these certain things first. So you do want to read through this. If you’re new to Field Nation and you haven’t done a lot of these tickets, or this is a new buyer that you’ve never seen before, then you want to read through these very thoroughly before you get on site.
When you get on site to make sure that you’re doing the job the way the buyer wants it. The buyers paying you, the buyer sets expectations. You need to fulfill those expectations to get paid and to get a good rating from the buyer. In this section, we also see a reconfirmation of the date and time. It’s nice to see that they estimate it’s going to take three hours.
You don’t want to overbook yourself, so being able to try to determine how long a call is going to take is really important so that, you know, okay, so if I did this one at 9… 10, 11, 12, then maybe an hour buffer. So I know I can take another job at 1 p.m. that same day. As we scroll further down, there’s more information.
Obviously we have equipment that’s been shipped to site. The bottom line is you just need to read through all of this stuff so you know what this is going to look like. The location is going to be over here. They actually have a little map. So you have a preview of the location and distance to site. There’s certain things you have to do for every Field Nation ticket to be able to close it out to get paid.
Every buyer can set their own parameters. One ticket may have three tasks that have to be fulfilled and maybe one upload. Another ticket can have 20 individual tasks and 20 photos or 10 photos and an Excel spreadsheet that’s filled out on a computer. The buyers set the requirements for what they want. It’s up to you to review all of those before you accept the ticket, so that when you do the ticket at this stage, you can fulfill all of those requirements.
In this case, we have required deliverables. Deliverables is a term that is used in this industry. It means things that you need to turn in to get paid. A deliverable could be a photo. It could be an Excel spreadsheet that’s been filled out in a certain way. Like for a site survey. It can be a piece of paper that’s been signed, digitally or paper.
It can be notes, it can be whatever the buyer wants it to be. Basically, deliverable is something that the buyer requires that you return so you can get paid. And so you can consider the job done. For example, I’ve got required deliverables. Got to take before pictures of the old as they were when I got there. Before pictures are always very important.
Covers your butt. Can’t be blamed for things that have photo proof otherwise. Pictures of the newly installed units and the cable management. A lot of times you’re taking photos of these jobs. You better do cable management, or you’re going to be spending a lot of time trying to get checked out of a ticket and get sent back in to go redo things after you think you’re already done.
So do it right the first time. Wrap up your cables, hide the cables, do whatever you can to make things look neat and tidy so that they look good in photos. Apparently they have a checklist that I need to fill out. Completion of a test transaction on the newly installed units, if applicable. And of course, somebody’s sign off. When you’re doing a Field Nation work order,
there’s three possible methods to get a customer sign off and to submit paperwork. One method is the generic Field Nation work order that is on every single ticket. You will find that by clicking this print button. This is an example of a generic Field Nation work order. If you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll see a customer sign off. At the bottom
here you will have the ability to put in the customer name, have the customer sign, put the date, time on site, time off site. That way you have something to document everything to upload to Field Nation. The second method to get a signature is to use the Field Nation Signature Capture option. At the bottom of any work order, where it has not been disabled by the buyer, will be a signature option.
The signature option is accessible from a phone or tablet. You’ll be able to hit “Add Signature”. You’ll be able to have the customer sign. Be able to type their name and add signature. Method number three is the pain in the tuchus. Every time you get asigned a Field Nation work order, you want to look in the documents section and see if the buyer has uploaded their own custom work order.
If the buyer uploads a custom work order, or if they have a task listed that says, “upload the custom work order” or something to that effect, then you need to be looking for a work order from the buyer and not the generic Field Nation printable one. For this work order, the client has their own work order sign off sheet. Like in this case, it says “work order signature page”.
That seems pretty obvious. The wording will be different obviously for every buyer, but you need to look for some kind of verbiage that looks like “sign off”, “signature page”, “work order”, yada yada. So,you know, if you’re looking for that and then in the tasks section, you can see they want you to upload the signed work order page instead of the previous file that I showed you.
This particular buyer has a work order that looks like this. They’re going to want a work order number. A sales order number and these items are going to be on the Field Nation website. If you can’t find them, then you want to call your buyer and ask them. Have them sign this just like you would a Field Nation work order, and you’ll upload this instead of the generic Field Nation one.
Over in this section are going to be a bunch of phone numbers and contacts for the job. That’s the section you’re going to look for any kind of a tech support contacts, or site contacts, or ticket, you know, general procedural contacts. With many of the tickets that you do, there’s going to be client documents. These are forms that the buyer has uploaded.
They’re going to be things like procedures, scopes of work, custom work orders that need to be filled out, floor plans, sample photos. The buyer can upload whatever they want, and you need to look through these. A lot of times it’s going to be very helpful. It may be a guide that will literally walk you through the install step by step. Showing you photos, where to plug every cable in.
Things like this make these jobs really, really simple if you can follow instructions. Every buyer can create as many tasks as they want to have you complete so that they know the job is done the way they want it done. In this case, they actually have three sections. They’ve got a prep section, an on site section, and a post section.
This buyer has a little video showing you how to achieve a five star rating with them. This is a great opportunity for me and you, if you thought this was your job, to actually watch this, to understand what they want so that you can get a five star rating. And that’s what we all want. We want to get the best rating we can to build up the strength of our profile. Before I can close this ticket out, I’m going to have to mark every single one of these items.
When you complete them, then a green checkmark is going to show up there, and then it will actually allow you to close the ticket. And until you complete all of these, will not actually be able to go in up to the top and hit “Mark Complete” and submit it for payment. Once you have completed one of the items, you will simply check on it and hit confirm and it changes to a checkmark.
You’ll notice that the check in… I can’t hit the check in button. When I showed you that blue button up at the top earlier that said, “Confirm”, you actually have to hit that button to change it to the next phase, which could be “Mark On My Way” or could be “Check In” at that point. But you have to hit that blue button until it gets to the “Check In” stage for this to allow you to check in.
And if you do click the blue button at the top where it says “Check In”, it will actually fulfill this task for you, so you don’t have to actually scroll down here and hit it. You will just see that it has been check marked. And of course the blue button will change to “Check Out”, and if you click “Check Out” on it then it will fulfill it down here.
The next task is that we’re going to have to upload photos before and after the installation. What’s interesting is there are three registers. So there’s going to be three sets of photos, but they only have one slot marked here. The next step is “upload the signed work order page” and they’re stressing must upload before closing out. Obviously that has to be uploaded before you call them to check out of the job.
The final thing would be to enter closeout notes and this is pretty straightforward. You just get a text box to write all the notes about what you did on the job. Make good notes on here so that an administrative person, a non-technical person could understand what happened. If everything went right, just tell them, you know, I installed this equipment, I did this and this.
I checked in with this person. I talked to this person in tech support. We tested everything. It’s all good. If things went wrong, or the site failed, or you were unable to complete it, you want to put notes in about what happened. What steps were taken to try to troubleshoot. Who did you talk to? When you have a site that’s not successful, you want to be a little extra noteworthy on it just to cover your butt, because you may get a callback from them in a week saying, hey, by the way, why don’t you do that job?
And by then you’ll have done 20 other jobs and forgotten half the details. Making notes is going to save your bacon. Scrolling below that, we’re going to see “buyer custom fields”. All of these sections are completely customizable. Your ticket may or may not have anything in these fields. It could just be the header and it could be blank.
But in this case, this client has put information in here. And that’s just kind of what was at the top of the ticket. “Provider Custom Fields”. Another customizable section of the work order. This is an area where you’re going to have to actually answer questions. So on top of doing closeout notes, you’re actually going to have to put answers into these questions.
This ticket is probably the most questions I’ve ever seen that have to be answered, because it goes from here…all the way down to here. At some point, I’m going to have to answer all of these questions to close this ticket out. So to answer the custom fields, you have to hit the little button and then it pops up.
So here’s all the questions that are going to have to be answered. When you have checked in and checked out, you’re going to see a time log showing up under here. That’ll show your check in and your check out. And you can actually have multiple check in and check outs. You know, if you go to a job site and you’re there for, you know, from eight to noon, and then you take lunch from noon to one and you can actually check out of the job and check back in at one.
And then when you’re done at the day, check out at five. And if it’s a multi-day job, then obviously you’ll check in again the next day. And so you can have multiple time entries based on the situation for the job. The deliverable section. This is where you actually do your uploads. All of this is customizable. The buyer may put ten line items here with specifics of what they want, and they’ll put limitations on it and say, well, it has to be a photo.
It has to be a PDF. Field Nation is just really good about giving the buyers a lot of options to customize their work orders and really make it work for them. That’s good news for you, because a platform that makes buyers happy is a place you want to be hanging out. That means you’re gonna have a lot of buyers for whom to do work.
In this case, they’ve only given me one labeled place for deliverables. This miscellaneous is on almost every single ticket from every buyer. They’re saying they want me to upload pictures before and after the installation, but I know based on the ticket description that there are three registers and they want before pictures and they want after pictures. So at a minimum that means six pictures plus there was a note up above saying they wanted a work order.
So that’s at least seven different files that need to be uploaded. Well, they didn’t create seven line items. The beauty is you can actually click on this and upload multiple items into the same place. Just go to add file. You can select seven different things, and hit open, and they’ll all upload. If the buyer chooses to use the shipment section, there may be shipment information here.
A lot of times they’ll just send you a note in the ticket, which I’ll show you that section in a minute. And then the signature section. This could be a little confusing because there’s an option here to add a signature, but the buyer said, further up in the ticket, that they actually want their own work order signed and uploaded.
So if you get a signature here and you forget to do that paperwork that they want, then you’ve wasted effort and you’re still not going to get paid. And so you go back to the site and get their work order filled out and signed. Let’s say this was another buyer and they would allow for the digital signature. You may have this on your phone or your tablet.
You can simply bring up this “Add Signature”. You can have the end user sign here, and then type their name, and then add signature. This would allow you to do a digital signature. Then you wouldn’t have to print out a physical piece of paper, or even print out the work order to PDF and do it on a tablet.
You could simply do it all just in the app or on the website Field Nation has a couple of different sections. You’ve got your detail section, which is what we’re on now, and that’s the main part that comes up every single time. We also have a messages section, and when you get assigned a ticket, you need to pay attention to whether there are messages in the system.
When a buyer sends you a message, you should also get an email, but you want to just double check that you haven’t overlooked emails and look in your messages section. You can send messages to the buyer and the buyer can send messages to you. The message section is visible to Field Nation, so if there’s ever a dispute between you and the buyer, they can see the notes and neither one of you can erase the note.
So if there’s ever a dispute, Field Nation will be able to see the notes and see the conversation to know who’s doing the right thing. Now if everything’s all done or deliverables are up, you’ve made your phone calls to check in, you’ve made your phone calls to check out, the site is up and running, the site is happy.
Your buyers are happy. It’s time to mark it complete. Let’s get paid. You’re going to hit the button to “Mark Complete”. If you missed something, this is what you’re going to see. A list of all the things that are required that have not yet been done. Obviously I haven’t done anything on this ticket, so there’s a huge list. You just want to make sure that you have fulfilled all the requirements before you mark it complete for payment.
Let’s look at a ticket that I’ve actually completed that I’m just waiting for the buyer to approve, so you can get an idea of what that looks like. Going to go to pending. You can see some differences from this, a completed job, and the previous one that I showed you where we still have not gone out to do the work.
You can see there’s a time log where I’ve logged 1.55 hours. You can see the pay estimate based on how much time I spent. It’s estimated to pay out at $117. You can see on this service call that there are a lot more tasks that had to be completed. And this is what they look like when they are complete.
You know, I set up my start time before, I reviewed the scope when I was on site. These are the things that I did. You know, I uploaded photos, I did a check in, I uploaded this particular photo, I uploaded this particular photo. Then on the post side, being the after completion, I went in and I did a check out and I entered closeout notes.
And as you can see, sample closeout notes, you know, issue came from building blah blah blah. You just want to put notes in so the buyer knows what happened on the site, what you did, they understand the situation. Unlike the other job that I showed you, on this one, the buyer custom fields. There are none. They do have one provider custom field question that I had to answer.
Here is the time log and a place where I can edit the time log. It shows that I checked in on this date, this time. I checked out at this date, this time, which gave an auto calculation. Since the job is marked complete, I can’t edit it right now. If I had made a mistake, I could go up to the top right corner and hit the button that says “Mark Incomplete”, which would bring the ticket back to me to make edits.
The next section down is deliverables. In this case, they wanted a couple of photos that didn’t apply, but there’s still a slot for it on Field Nation. So you still have to put something in that slot to be able to close the ticket. I’ve just created a couple of template images that fulfill the requirements and like have a little text on them.
So I have one obviously that’s marked “no picture needed”. I have another one that says “unable to complete scope of work”. I have another one that says “site not ready”. Just basically these little images I created in paint and have the text in it so that if I upload it and one of the administrative people see it, they’ll understand, okay, he’s uploading a dummy image to fulfill the requirement.
Then here you’ll see photos of the actual equipment, things that did apply. Now let’s talk about the best part of completed tickets. And it’s the pay. Field Nation allows their buyers to select certain net terms. Net terms means that the buyer can say, once I mark the job complete, you will not get paid for seven days, for ten days, for 15 days, for 30 days.
They set those terms. And so you need to watch for those when you’re bidding on the jobs and requesting them so that you can’t complain on the back end. You had the choice on the front end to say, okay, I’m willing to wait or I’m not willing to wait. Field Nation does have this “transfer balance now” option where you can sign up for their pro features, you’re already paying fees to Field Nation.
And by doing this other option, you’re paying even more fees just to get your money faster. My philosophy is never pay extra fees to get your money faster. It’s just not worth it. Be patient and fill up the pipe. Think of it as a pipe that you start pumping water to at one end. Yes, it’s going to take forever for that money to get to the end of the pipe, but if you’re consistently doing jobs and consistently filling the pipe, then once the money starts coming out, then it will continue to come out.
That’s much better to get as much of the money on the back end than it is to try to lose all these fees just to get it in in three days or four days or seven days. I don’t sign up for any of these “get paid faster” things. Because of the net terms, then I have staggered payment dates and you’ll see kind of a confusing thing that says on the 19th, I’m going to get this much, and then on the 19th I’m going to get this much.
Some of these tickets were on basically no terms, so they were immediate payment. And that is these here at the top. Now immediate does not mean immediate. It means every Friday because Field Nation runs deposits every Friday when the next payment date comes. This section will be the jobs that had no net terms. This is showing any tickets that were on net terms that have finally reached the net terms by the 19th. Then this is any tickets that are reaching terms by the 26th. Total payments due to me at this point is basically $875.
I just won’t see all of that on the 19th. I will see some on the 19th, some of it on the 26th. What’s nice is you can kind of see your totals. So for April, I made $819 off of Field Nation. March, I made $391. Field Nation is not my only source of client income. Just to give you a little idea of what you can make in a mid-market. The area that I’m in is probably half a million people in the city limits, and maybe a million people in the metro area, if I’m lucky.
In December I made $4,200, in November I made $3,700. If my other Field Nation alternative clients are providing work and the pay is good, then I’m going to focus on them. If I don’t get a lot of jobs from them that I may do more Field Nation work. I’m like water. I will take the path of least resistance to the best money.
The nice thing about Field Nation is it allows you to get literally a paper check if you wanted, or you can do direct deposit to you know, cash cards, to PayPal, or to a bank account. So it’s really flexible in how you get your money. There’s been a couple of buyers here and there, the disputed the result of a ticket or maybe there was a disagreement
we couldn’t resolve. 99.9% of every ticket that I’ve ever done, I’ve been paid for. I feel very confident in payments from Field Nation. When they say that I’m going to get paid, I get paid. In my next video, I’m going to be talking about your Field Nation profile, and what do you need to do to really stand out to the buyer?
So they will select you over another tech. If you got value from this video, please take a moment to like the video and subscribe to the channel to make sure that you catch all the new videos that we’re putting out about Field Nation, WorkMarket, and all the other Field Nation alternative clients out there that we’re talking about. My goal with Field Tech Academy is to help you either become a field tech, or to become a better field tech. To improve your skill set, to make more money, to become aware of more clients and really build a community.
I want to hear what you have to say. If there’s something that you would love to see me cover, let me know in the comments and I’ll do what I can to do that. If you have questions, I try to respond to as many of the comments as I can. And be sure to check out my website, fieldtechacademy.com for personal consulting services.
Always glad to help you. Thank you for your time.