This article is for administrators. It covers the three things that decide how the EAM mobile app behaves for your team.
How they log their labour — one setting, and it changes the whole job screen.
What they are allowed to see — which of two user groups they belong to.
Whether they can add parts and stock from the phone — one setting plus two permissions.
The settings live in the EAM sidebar under Settings → General. The permissions live somewhere else entirely: the platform settings (the gear icon), under User Groups and Platform Users.
⚠️ After changing any of these, the person has to refresh the app. On the phone, open Settings from the home screen and tap Refresh Data. Until they do, they carry on with the old behaviour.
💡 If you land on an old Settings → EAM Settings page saying the settings have moved, use the Go to EAM Settings button on it.
1. How labour is logged
Hour Logging Type is the biggest setting in the app. It decides how mechanics record their hours, and it changes what the job screen looks like for everybody.
Both settings this article covers are on that page: Hour Logging Type near the top, and Mechanics Can Add New Parts below it.
Option | What mechanics see | Choose it when |
Stopwatch | A Start Work button, a live timer and a pause button. | Your team works one job at a time with a phone to hand, and you want hours measured rather than remembered. |
Estimates | A circle on every task, and a prompt for a duration when one is ticked off. | Work is written up afterwards, or billed in standard blocks of time. |
Start and Stop | The same, but the prompt asks for start and end clock times. | Payroll or a customer needs to see when the work happened, not just how long it took. |
Whichever you pick, the same thing happens behind the scenes: the first sign of real work moves the job to Pending and the vehicle to In Maintenance. On Stopwatch that trigger is pressing Start Work; on the other two it is finishing the first task.
💡 Decide this one first. It has the biggest effect on daily habits, and changing it later means retraining everybody. See Logging your time for what each looks like in practice.
2. Permissions: which user group to give someone
This is not on the settings page. It comes from the user groups on the person's account, and it is what decides which of the two home screens they get.
Two groups cover the people who use the mobile app:
User group | Give it to | What they get in the app |
EAM Maintain User | Mechanics who work through work orders on the phone and have no reason to use the web. | A job list, time logging, parts, and the completion flow. They can also start an inspection. |
EAM Maintain Inspection | People who only fill in inspection checklists — yard staff, cleaners, casual checkers. | No job list at all. Their home screen is a single card for starting an inspection, and the bar along the bottom shrinks to Home and Scan. |
Both sit in User Groups, alongside the other groups your organisation uses.
Neither group is a mobile-only licence in itself — it is a set of permissions. Somebody in EAM Maintain User simply has no reason to open the web app, because everything the group allows is what the phone does.
Putting somebody in a group
Open the platform settings (the gear icon) and go to Platform Users.
Click the person's name.
Click Add Membership.
Type maint in the User Group box. Both groups appear — pick the one you want.
Click Add Membership to save. The person's Memberships list now shows the group.
The person above is set up for inspections only: their single membership is EAM Maintain Inspection, so the app gives them the inspection card and no job list.
You can work the other way round too: open User Groups, click the group, and use Add Membership there to add people to it.
What a group actually hands out
A group's Access Grants tab shows the role it gives and how far that reaches. For both of these groups it is a single grant of the matching role across the whole organisation.
💡 See Your home screen for what each of the two versions looks like on the phone.
3. Adding parts and stock from a work order
Back on Settings → General, the checkbox Mechanics Can Add New Parts reads Allow mechanics to add new parts to the system.
It decides what happens when a mechanic, part in hand, reaches for something that is not in the catalogue or is not recorded as being in stock anywhere.
Ticked — they can create the part and record the stock for it from their phone, choosing the location they are taking it from, without leaving the job. The app writes a real, finalised inventory adjustment against that location, so the count is correct from that moment on.
Unticked — the app reports that no stock is available, and they cannot go further.
⚠️ Turning this on is only half the job. The setting opens the door; the person's own permissions decide whether they can walk through it. Two separate permissions are involved, and without them the options stay hidden even with the setting ticked.
To do this | They also need permission to |
Create a part that is not in the catalogue at all | Create parts. Without it, Create New Part never appears in the search. |
Stock a part the system has none of | Write inventory adjustments. Creating stock is an inventory adjustment, so this is required whoever asked for it. |
A mechanic who needs both — the usual case — needs both permissions on top of the setting. Add them to the group you use for mechanics.
Tick the setting if your mechanics regularly work with parts that are not tracked, and you would rather have a slightly rough stock count than a job that cannot be finished. Leave it unticked if your stores team needs tight control of what enters the catalogue.
💡 See Adding parts for what the mechanic sees at each step.
Where to next
Logging your time — what each logging type looks like in practice