Bin counts, garden sizes and access notes belong on the booking, not in a chat thread. Here's how custom fields in Action Plan stop the day-of phone calls.
Your crew pulls up outside a house in Centurion. The customer booked a bin clean, but nobody wrote down how many bins there are. Or it's a garden service, and the team has no idea whether they're facing a small front lawn or a big property with beds and hedges. Or the gate is locked and the access instructions are somewhere in a WhatsApp thread from last Tuesday. So someone phones the office, the office scrolls back through messages, and the crew waits.
None of this is dramatic. It happens every week, and it's avoidable. The fix is to capture those details when the job is booked, not when the van arrives.
What goes missing between booking and job
Most small field businesses take bookings in several ways at once: a phone call, a WhatsApp message, a form on the website, a quick chat at the end of the last job. The important facts land wherever the person taking the booking happened to be. Sometimes that's a notebook, sometimes it's a voice note, and sometimes it's just someone's memory.
The booking usually has the basics, such as the name, the address and the date. What it's missing is the detail that tells your crew what the job actually involves: the number of bins, the size of the garden, which bathroom has the leak, or how to get onto the property. When that detail isn't on the job, your team either guesses or calls in.
What custom fields are in Action Plan
Custom fields let you add your own information to bookings, on top of the standard customer details, address and booking notes. You set them up once under Settings, then Custom Fields, and they're available on your bookings from then on.
You pick the type of field to suit the information:
- Text, for anything descriptive
- Number, for counts such as bins or windows
- Dropdown, when there's a fixed set of answers
- Checkbox, for a simple yes or no
- Date and time, for anything scheduled
Fields can sit on the booking itself (the documentation gives examples like Quantity, Site Details and Special Instructions) or on individual tasks, if you break jobs into steps. You can also mark a field as required, so it can't be left out when a booking is captured. That's the part that closes the gap. Whoever takes the booking can't skip the question your crew always ends up asking.
Examples by trade
The detail that matters changes from one trade to the next. A few examples:
- Bin cleaning: bin counts, pickup schedules and service frequency, so the crew knows how many bins to expect and when.
- Garden maintenance: garden size, plant types and seasonal schedules, so the team brings the right equipment and knows what the customer expects at this time of year.
- Plumbing: whether it's an emergency call, the number of bathrooms and the pipe type, so the plumber arrives with the right parts.
- Window cleaning: building height, window count and access method, so you send the right people with the right equipment.
Access catches out a lot of crews, whatever the trade. A Site Details or Special Instructions field is a natural home for it: gate codes, where to park, which entrance to use, whether the dog will be out. You can name the field whatever suits your team, such as "Access notes" or "Gate code". What matters is that it's captured once and sits on the booking, not in a chat.
Setting it up without overdoing it
It's tempting to add a field for everything. Resist that. A long booking form slows down whoever is taking the call, and the details that really matter get lost among the ones that don't.
Start with the two or three questions your crew asks the office most often. If you're not sure what they are, ask your team leader which calls they made last week. Make only the critical ones required, such as bin count for a bin clean or access notes for a gated estate, and leave the rest optional.
For work you do over and over, pair custom fields with task templates, so the steps and the details come together every time. The setup guide covers custom fields, tasks and templates step by step.
Try it on your own bookings
Custom fields are included on every plan, so there's nothing extra to unlock. You can compare the options on the pricing page.
The quickest way to judge whether they suit your business is to set up the fields your crew keeps asking about and run a week of bookings through them. Start a 14-day free trial, or ask us whether it fits your trade if you'd rather talk it through first.
Related read: From WhatsApp Chaos to One Shared Calendar.
Photo: Barn Images on StockSnap