The hardest test for a technician app isn't the demo. It's a crawlspace under a 1960s ranch, a mechanical room three floors down, or a rooftop unit in a dead zone, with a customer waiting for a price. TradesWork Field was built for that test first. We call it Basement Mode: the next two days of work and the whole price book live on the phone, every change goes into an ordered queue, and the app tells the tech plainly what's saved and what's waiting.
Basement Mode, in detail
Offline support in field apps is often a checkbox. Here is how it actually works in TradesWork Field.
What's downloaded ahead. On open, on reconnect, on returning to the app and on pull-to-refresh, the app fetches today's and tomorrow's appointments with every detail, the full active price book with images, kits and member prices, the estimate toolkit (proposal templates, rebates, brochures) and the tax rate. Everything lands in a cache that survives the app being closed.
How it decides it's offline. A phone on a basement Wi-Fi with no internet behind it reports "connected". The app doesn't believe it. It counts itself online only when the radio is up and the TradesWork server actually answers. When a request fails at the network level, it probes the server every 15 seconds until any reply comes back.
How changes are saved. Every change goes into a queue stored on the phone. Job changes share one lane and run strictly in order, because order matters: create the estimate, sell it, then record the payment. Photos, clock taps and data-plate scans each have their own lane, so a slow photo upload never holds up a status change. Every change is safe to replay, so a change that may already have landed isn't duplicated.
| Works with no signal | Waits for signal |
|---|---|
| Opening jobs, customer and equipment history | Card payments and Tap to Pay |
| Status changes, pause and resume | Adding lines to an invoice |
| Notes, pinned location notes | Sending pay or approval links |
| Building and selling estimates | Reading a data-plate photo |
| Forms and checklists | AI answers, troubleshooting and summaries |
| Photos with markup | Pinning or unpinning an older note |
| Clock in and out, truck counts, restock requests | Switching companies (blocked until synced) |
| Cash and check payments |
ServiceTitan's marketing says its Field Mobile App and "all its features" work offline.1 Its help center is narrower: Dynamic Pricing needs an internet connection, and only static prices show offline.2 If your price book uses rules rather than fixed prices, that difference shows up the first time a tech tries to quote from a basement.
The guided visit
Every appointment opens on the same five stages: Arrive, Diagnose, Present options, Work, Wrap up. Each stage lists what's left, built from your own rules: forms triggered for this job type, photos required at that stage (before, after, data plate, completed install, problem found), whether options must be presented, and whether the invoice has work on it.
Items are either Required, which block marking the job done, or Reminders, which show but don't stop the tech. When something is missing, the app says exactly what: "Can't finish yet. Still needed: data plate photo, Furnace safety inspection." The same check runs on the server, so a checklist the phone shows as done is one the office accepts. See forms and checklists for how the office sets those rules.
Around the flow, the appointment screen carries the pre-job brief, equipment and its history, membership status, estimates with good/better/best options, financing, Tap to Pay, texts to the customer, a voice note, and a pause button for jobs waiting on parts or a callback.
Speaking the tech's language
The app ships in English and Spanish. It follows the phone's language by default and each tech can override it. The company also picks its words: residential shops see Customer and Location, commercial shops see Client and Job site, and a tech can switch for themselves.
Translation stops at what people typed. Customer names, notes, form questions written by the office and price book names stay as written. A voice note recorded in Spanish is written into the job record in English, so the office reads one language.
Calculators that work in a crawlspace
The calculators are plain math on the phone, so they work with no signal. Inputs and outputs are in US field units (°F, psig, CFM, inches of water column, feet, BTU/h), and every answer says how it was worked out.
| Group | Calculators |
|---|---|
| Refrigeration | Superheat, subcooling, target superheat (fixed orifice) |
| Airflow | Duct size from CFM, CFM from duct size, temperature rise and airflow, temperature split |
| Electrical | Voltage drop (copper or aluminum, single or three phase) |
| Gas | Gas pipe size (natural gas, Schedule 40) |
| Load | Quick BTU estimate, labelled as a rule of thumb, not a Manual J |
Pressure-temperature data covers R-410A, R-22, R-32 and R-454B. The R-22 and R-32 tables come from NIST saturation properties,3 R-410A from NIST values cross-checked against the manufacturer's chart, and R-454B is built from the manufacturer's published chart and glide and flagged as approximate in every result. Superheat, subcooling and temperature split readings can be saved to the equipment record.
Free calculatorSuperheat, subcooling & target superheat calculatorEnter pressures and line temperatures; get superheat, subcooling and a target superheat check.ServiceTitan offers airflow, subcool and superheat, and duct sizing calculators as part of Field Pro, which sits under its Pro products.4
Photos, markup and the data plate
Techs shoot a burst, then review: leave out the bad ones, name them, mark them up. Upload quality is a setting (standard at 2,048 px or high at 3,072 px). Markup is stored as drawing on top of the original, never burned into it, so the original is always kept and arrows can be moved or removed later. It travels with the photo through the offline queue.
The data-plate scan turns one photo into an equipment record: make, model, serial, size, refrigerant and charge, plus the unit's age decoded from the serial for nine common brands (including Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem and A. O. Smith). Where a brand has used several serial formats, the age is marked as an estimate, and a date printed on the plate wins. With no signal, the photo is saved and read once the phone reconnects. No plate? Enter it by hand.
My pay
Techs on performance pay open My pay to see what they've earned today, this week or this pay period: commission and spiffs, hourly pay and tips, by job. It updates as they sell options, finish jobs and get paid, and shows whether the period is pending approval, approved or sent to payroll. Once approved, it's locked; later changes land in the next period. Offline, it shows pay as of the last sync and says so. Setup lives in performance pay.
Rolling it out to a crew
- Load the price book and job types first; the app is only as good as what it downloads.
- Invite techs and have each one open the practice company for a few minutes before their first real day.
- Turn on required items one at a time, starting with the data-plate photo.
- On day one, have every tech open the app on shop Wi-Fi before leaving, so the next two days are on the phone.
- At the end of the first week, ask who saw "waiting for signal" and where. Those addresses are your dead zones.
Footnotes
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ServiceTitan, Field Mobile App product page (FAQ). https://www.servicetitan.com/features/field-mobile-app ↩
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ServiceTitan help center, "Dynamic Pricing overview" (FAQ on pricing in the Field Mobile App). https://help.servicetitan.com/docs/dynamic-pricing-overview ↩
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NIST Chemistry WebBook, Thermophysical Properties of Fluid Systems. https://webbook.nist.gov/chemistry/fluid/ ↩
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ServiceTitan, Field Pro product page. https://www.servicetitan.com/features/pro/field ↩
