Mobile repair: the van, the stops, the fix at the curb.

Mobile repair has the same work as a shop, plus a road between every job. A van tech doing corporate fleet checks in the morning and home tune-ups in the afternoon loses real time to a badly ordered day: crossing town twice, arriving at an office park after the fleet manager has left, running out of tubes at stop five.

The Service plan treats the van as a first-class part of the shop. Stops will appear on a map, get put in a sensible order, and run from the field app on the tech's phone. Parts on the van will be a stock location of their own. Payment will happen at the curb from a link or a QR code.

Some of that works today. Each stop is a visit at a site's address, assigned to a tech and a day, so the van's week is on the schedule and the tech's Today page lists their stops. Route optimization and the map are planned, not built, and the mapping and routing provider is one of the plan's open decisions.

The schedule's map view will show every stop as a pin, with drag to reorder and manual correction for a pin that geocoded to the wrong side of a building. Route optimization will order a tech's or a crew's day, or a whole week, from a start point to an end point using real drive times. Find-a-time suggestions will account for drive time when you add a new stop.

Booking rules for vans include a service area and a maximum drive time, so a rider twenty miles outside your area is not offered a slot on a day the van is working the other side of town. Arrival windows let you promise 'between 1 and 3' instead of a minute you cannot keep.

When a day needs many stops at once, such as a quarterly safety check across a corporate fleet at several sites, the plan supports creating visits for many jobs in one go.

The field app is an installable web app, added to the phone's home screen, and it is new. It keeps working with no signal: checklist answers, submissions and visit completion are queued on the phone and sent oldest first when the signal comes back, with repeated edits to one answer collapsed into one. It caches only the app itself, not job lists, so with no signal it shows an honest offline page rather than a stale list of stops. It has not yet been widely tested on real phones, so run a day in a dead zone before you rely on it.

The plan adds one-tap directions in the tech's preferred navigation app, and a foreground location check-in when they open a job at the stop, which records where they were when the work started. Neither is built yet. There is no background GPS tracking of phones, now or planned. Live van location in the plan comes from vehicle telematics, a later phase, not from the tech's phone.

An on-my-way text with an ETA is part of the plan and depends on the shop having a registered texting number in the erp.io CRM.

Each van will be its own stock location, so the parts on board are counted separately from the shop shelf and used against the job at the stop. Reorder points can flag that the van is low on 700c tubes before it leaves in the morning. Inventory is a later phase of the Service build.

Payment in the field will be a Stripe payment link or a QR code the rider scans from the tech's screen, or a card typed in. There is no Tap to Pay, because that needs a native app and the field app is web only. For most riders a QR code at the curb is as quick as a card reader.