Your organisation chooses one of three ways for you to record your hours. Which one you have changes how the whole job screen looks and behaves, so it is worth knowing which you are using.
Which one am I using?
Open any job and look at the button along the bottom of the screen.
Says Start Work → you are on Stopwatch.
Says Complete Next Task → you are on Estimates or Start and Stop. You will find out which as soon as you tick a task off.
The three ways, and why they exist
Way of working | Suits a shop where… | Why you would choose it |
Stopwatch | People work one job at a time, at the vehicle, with a phone in their pocket. | The app does the timing for you. Hours are measured rather than remembered at the end of the day. Most accurate, and the least typing. |
Estimates | Work gets written up afterwards, or jobs are charged in standard blocks of time. | Quickest to fill in. One tap on a button like "1 h" and you are done. |
Start and Stop | Payroll or a customer needs to see when the work happened, not just how long it took. | Records the actual clock times, so the record shows exactly which part of the day the job took up. |
💡 An administrator sets this for everyone. See Setting up the EAM mobile app for your team.
Stopwatch, step by step
The app times the work for you. You press start, do the job, and press finish.
Example below: vehicle PT-017, job "Brake service and safety check".
Step 1. Open the job.
Nothing is running yet, so the tasks are just a list. There are no circles to tick.
The only button is Start Work. Look at the two coloured labels at the top: the job is Open and the vehicle is Active. Both are about to change on their own.
Step 2. Press Start Work.
The app starts timing the first task. That task turns green and shows a Working badge counting up. Every task now has a circle you can tap.
Compare the coloured labels with the picture above. Two things changed by themselves:
The job went from Open to Pending, so the office can see it is underway.
The vehicle went from Active to In Maintenance, so nobody sends it out while it is on a lift.
Step 3. Moving to a different task.
Tap the circle of the task you want to move to. The app asks what to do with the time already on the clock, because that tap could mean three different things:
Complete it and move on — save the time, tick the old task off, start timing the new one.
Move the time over — you had the timer running on the wrong task. The time follows across to the right one.
Discard the time and move on — save nothing. The old task stays open.
Step 4. The menu on a task.
Tap the ... on any task row. From there you can:
See how much time is already saved against it.
Use Log Time to add time by hand, for work the app never timed.
See the parts on that task, or add one.
Open the task's own screen for the full details.
This works whether or not a timer is running.
Step 5. The menu for the whole job.
The ... at the top right covers the job as a whole: the parts list, reordering the tasks, pulling in issues already reported, and giving the job back.
Options only appear when they are useful, so this menu is shorter on some jobs.
Step 6. Press Finish Work.
You get a summary showing when the work started, when it ended, and how long that adds up to.
Two boxes are already ticked. You can untick either one:
Mark task as complete
Start timer on the next task
Discard throws the time away instead of saving it. Handy if the timer ran through your lunch.
⚠️ Check the total before you tap Complete. If it looks shorter or longer than the job really took, change the start and end times on this screen first. Whatever you confirm here is what gets saved against the job.
Step 7. That task is done.
It moves to the bottom of the list with a tick and the time saved against it. If you left the second box ticked, the timer is already running on the next task.
What the pause button does. It saves the time so far and leaves the task open. Pressing Start Work again starts a fresh stretch, so a task you come back to three times shows as three separate stretches of work.
Estimates, step by step
There is no timer here. You tick a task off and tell the app how long it took.
Because there is no timer, there is no Start Work button and no pause.
Example below: vehicle PT-018, job "Preventive maintenance – 12,000 mile service".
Step 1. Open the job.
Every task has a circle straight away. There are two ways to finish one:
Tap its circle.
Tap Complete Next Task at the bottom, which picks up the first task still outstanding.
Both do exactly the same thing.
Step 2. Say how long it took.
The buttons across the top cover the common answers. The dials below take anything else.
The green button stays greyed out until you have entered a time. Skip logging time finishes the task without recording any hours, for jobs too small to bother with.
Step 3. Confirm.
Once you pick a time the button turns solid and spells out exactly what will be saved.
Step 4. The first task marks the job as started.
Look at the coloured labels: the job is now Pending and the vehicle is In Maintenance. This is the same change Start Work makes on Stopwatch, just triggered a different way.
Only the first task does this. The rest change nothing.
Step 5. Finish the last task.
The app offers to close the whole job out for you.
Start and Stop, step by step
This works just like Estimates, with one difference: instead of "how long did it take", the app asks "when did you start and when did you finish".
Example below: vehicle PT-019, job "Cooling system leak repair".
Step 1. Open the job.
Same as Estimates. Every task has a circle, and Complete Next Task sits at the bottom.
Step 2. Enter when the work happened.
Two sets of dials sit side by side, in the order the work happened: Started on the left, Ended on the right. The app works out the total from those two.
⚠️ If the total looks too short, check the Started time. The dials open on a recent time, so a job that took two hours can easily read as 30 minutes. Wind the start time back before you save it. This is the record that reaches payroll and job costs.
Step 3. The first task marks the job as started.
Job to Pending, vehicle to In Maintenance, exactly as in the other two ways of working.
Why the vehicle goes into maintenance by itself
The app changes the vehicle's status for you, so nobody sends out something that is up on a lift.
It happens the first time you show real work is happening. What counts depends on which way of working you are on:
Way of working | What sets it off |
Stopwatch | Pressing Start Work |
Estimates | Finishing the first task |
Start and Stop | Finishing the first task |
Worth knowing:
Only a vehicle currently marked Active gets moved. One already off the road stays as it is.
Later tasks change nothing, and unticking a task does not put it back.
Putting the vehicle back on the road at the end is a separate step you control. See Finishing a work order.