I was recently asked for some advice by a current RIDGIDConnect user who was having success on the site for the plumbing side of his business but was curious as to the best way to organize his reports from his HVAC work. Here were some of his requirements:
- Be able to look up all of the work he has done at a particular facility. Each facility is roughly 100k square feet so a single, ongoing report per facility will not work.
- Be able to quickly look at the maintenance history of a particular entity inside the facility such as a boiler or compressor.
- Group each individual maintenance job on an individual report so the media and documentation can be communicated to the customer on a single report.
After thinking about the set up for this, it seemed like a great topic for a blog post as it could hopefully help out quite a few users become acquainted with some of the more advanced capabilities of the site.
The first step is to go into the "my Contacts" section and create a contact record for the particular building you're working with. Here's how I filled mine out:
Note that I used a "Commercial" contact instead of the default choice of "Residential". This gives me a Company field which makes more sense to use than trying to fit a building name into the First and Last name fields.
Next, click on the "Contacts" tab at the bottom when you're viewing the contact record for our "Engineering Building" in my case, or whatever you have called yours. You'll see a button with a person and a plus sign that allows you to create a sub-contact related to our "Engineering Building". Use this to create a record for your piece of equipment. Here, I called it "Compressor".
Now, I'm ready to create my reports. Fill out the fields on the report as you normally would and add all of the media from the current job you've worked on. Add the person or company's name you want to show up on the report in the "Customer" area. Add both the building contact record and piece of equipment's contact record in the "Contacts" section. These names/records won't show up on the report someone you send it to sees but is our key link for organizing these reports.
In the future, you can go back to the "my Contacts" section and pull up either the contact record for the building you're at, or for an individual piece of equipment and use the reports tab at the bottom to see all of the reports you've created there.
