How do you structure your technician checklists?

Pro tip: We cap routine maintenance at 8-10 items max. Anything longer and you'll watch techs hammer through it in the truck before they knock on the door.

Our structure:

• Safety first — always 2-3 items, can't mark job complete without pass
• Customer-facing — unit condition, photo of area before/after
• Technical — voltage, pressures, whatever's relevant

For diagnostics, we use a separate template that's basically a decision tree. Start with symptoms, checklist branches based on what they find. Takes more setup but cuts completion time way down.

On photos: We require minimum two (arrival condition + completed work) for every job. No exceptions. It's saved us more times than I can count on "you damaged my floor" claims.

so basically what we figured out was that the checklists need to match how the tech actually works the job not how the office thinks the job goes if that makes sense

like we had this checklist that wanted us to test static pressure before even opening the unit which like nobody does that you open it first and get dirty then test right so we reordered it to match actual workflow and compliance went way up

also we use required fields but not for everything just the things that actually matter for callbacks — if you make everything required then nothing is really required you know

@Connor — workflow ordering is a good catch. Our electrical template has techs verifying lockout before accessing the panel, which sounds logical but isn't how they actually approach it. Will review sequence.

On "required" inflation — agreed. We're auditing which fields actually trigger follow-up actions vs. which are just data collection.

In my experience, conditional logic sounds great until you have to maintain it. Every "if this then that" is another thing that breaks when you update service types or roll out changes.

We went with separate templates per major job category — install, service, maintenance, callback. Four templates, period. Techs know which one to grab, dispatch knows what to expect, and I don't spend my weekends debugging why fields aren't showing.

Your mileage may vary but simple scales better than clever.

We're in a similar spot — 15 techs, mixed residential commercial. The team spent way too long debating whether to nest checklists or keep them flat.

What actually moved the needle for us:

• Techs helped write them. Not just reviewed — wrote. Changed the dynamic from "compliance exercise" to "this is how I do good work."
• Dispatch gets a summary view. Not the full checklist, just red/yellow/green on the items that block billing or trigger callbacks.

One question for the group: do you allow techs to add freeform notes to a checklist item, or does everything have to be structured? We're split on whether the notes field just becomes a workaround for bad checklist design.

@Paula — we require structured where we can enforce standards, allow freeform where context matters. Simple rule: if it affects the invoice or the next visit, it's structured. If it's "customer's dog kept jumping on me," freeform.

Also want to flag something I didn't see mentioned: review cadence. Checklists drift. We audit 10% of completed jobs monthly against template — not to punish, to catch when the template needs updating. Found three items last quarter that techs were bypassing because the equipment changed and nobody updated the checklist.

lol yeah we had a checklist item for "check belt tension" on units that haven't had belts since 2019

nobody said anything either just kept clicking N/A

tbh the best thing our ops person did was shadow a tech for a day and see which items actually made sense in sequence. changed like half the template

Sylvia, excellent discussion — this is exactly the type of operational insight that helps us build better defaults.

A few considerations based on patterns we're seeing across our customer base:

• Template inheritance is powerful for multi-trade operations. Core safety items at the parent level, trade-specific items inherited. Reduces duplication without sacrificing relevance.
• Completion time tracking — we're seeing strong correlation between checklist duration and field adoption. Jobs with checklists completed under 2 minutes show higher variance in callback rates.

We will be sharing more on this in our upcoming best practices guide. In the meantime, for those managing conditional complexity, the custom checklist templates release includes nested section logic that may address some of the maintenance concerns raised here.

Happy to connect anyone interested in early feedback sessions.

Following this closely! Our team's checklists are all over the place — some techs have their own personal notes they add to every job and some don't document anything beyond the minimum.

Quick question — when you all say "required photos" do you mean the tech can't mark complete without them, or just that they're prompted? And does that slow things down at the end of the day when they're trying to get home? Thanks so much for any insights!

@Deja — hard gate for us. Can't submit without photos. We're clear in onboarding that this adds 3-5 minutes per job but saves 30+ minutes on callbacks and disputes.

On end-of-day rush: we moved photo review to dispatch, not the tech. Tech uploads, dispatch spot-checks next morning. Removed the bottleneck at 5pm.