Field Service Scheduler

One of the more interesting projects I’ve built started while I was installing garage doors, windows, and entry doors.

I had never done that kind of work before. It was cold as hell, I was learning everything on the fly, and I was getting a firsthand look at how the business actually operated.

The owner knew I was also trying to build software and grow LayerLane, and he was really supportive of it. Between jobs, supply pickups, or slower parts of the day, he’d sometimes give me room to work on the system and think through what could be improved.

That meant a lot to me because I wasn’t sitting at home guessing how a field-service business worked. I was doing the jobs, picking up materials, talking to the owner, watching the office workflow, and then building around problems I had just seen.

The company relied heavily on an older system called Ponderosa. It handled a lot of the business, but it was also a major constraint.

So I started building my own system around what I was seeing.

It grew into scheduling for different crews, customer and job records, quotes, invoices, notes, transaction history, and a database for doors and windows used when putting together customer jobs.

One of the biggest things I wanted to improve was payment.

If an installer finished a job and the customer wanted to pay by card, somebody back at the office still had to handle it. Customers would ask if they could just pay right there.

So I built Stripe into the workflow so a payment link could be sent and tied back to the customer and job.

The hardest part was connecting everything back to Ponderosa.

I found import and export formats I could work with and got pretty far, but I never found a reliable enough integration for the system to become something the company actually used.

That ended up being one of the biggest lessons from the project.

Building software around a real business is way different from building a clean demo where you control everything. Sometimes the old software is the constraint. Sometimes the integration you need just isn’t there. And sometimes the better system still has to work around the way the business already operates.

Field Service Scheduler never became Tommy D’s production system, but it changed the way I think about building software.

And I’ll always appreciate the owner giving me room to explore it while I was there.

I wasn’t guessing at a workflow.

I had been standing inside it.