Service Field tickets
Field ticket automation
You are on OpenInvoice for one customer, a different portal for the next, and paper for the rest. We build the layer underneath that feeds all of them, and catches the errors before your customer’s system does.
The short version. Between a job finishing and an invoice being accepted there are usually nine handoffs, several days of travel time for a piece of paper, one round of manual data entry, and no systematic check that what you billed matches what you contracted to bill. Field ticket automation compresses that to a same-day process with the contract check built in.
Where this fits
Yes, you are probably already on somebody’s ticketing platform. That is the problem, not the solution.
Enverus OpenTicket and OpenInvoice, Cortex, Ariba, Pandell, Engage Mobilize, these are real products and several of them are good. They have one thing in common: they were built for the operator, not for you. They exist to automate your customer’s verification and approval of your invoice. You are a participant in someone else’s accounts payable process.
Which is why being on one of them does not fix your problem. You do not work for one operator. You work for eight or fifteen, each one mandating a different platform with different rules, different codes and different rejection conditions. Somebody in your office is the integration layer between all of them, and they are doing it by hand.
The part nobody sells you
- One internal system of record that feeds every portal your customers mandate, instead of one process per customer.
- Validation before submission, against your own rate schedules and authorizations, so errors are caught on your side of the fence.
- The tickets that never reach a platform at all, the paper, the photographs, the texts, and the customers still taking email.
There is a second-order argument here worth sitting with. As operator-side automation spreads, your billing errors get caught more reliably, not less, an automated reconciliation flags a rate mismatch every single time, where a busy AP clerk caught it one time in five. The better your customers’ systems get, the more a pre-submission check on your side is worth.
What it does
Five stages, and the fourth one is where the value is.
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Capture
The ticket is created or photographed where the work happened, on a phone, offline if there is no signal. It syncs when the truck reaches coverage.
Removes the days a paper ticket spends traveling to the office.
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Extract
Handwriting, printed forms, photographs and PDFs become structured line items, hours, equipment, personnel, consumables, location, dates.
Removes the manual re-keying step and the transcription errors that come with it.
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Validate
Each line is checked against the governing MSA rate schedule, the applicable PO or AFE, and the contract’s completeness requirements before anyone approves it.
Catches the rate mismatches and missing authorizations that become short-pays.
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Review exceptions
Clean tickets pass through. Anything ambiguous, incomplete or out of tolerance is held in a queue with the reason stated and the source document attached.
Your reviewer spends their day on the tickets that need judgment rather than the ones that were always fine.
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Hand off to billing
Approved tickets are pushed into your accounting or ERP system, and where relevant pre-checked against your customer’s e-invoicing portal rules.
Reduces portal rejections, which are invisible delays most operators never measure.
What it connects to
It fits around what you already run.
This is custom software, not a product you have to conform to. The integration surface is decided by what is already in your building.
- Accounting and ERP
- Whatever you run. We build against its API where one exists, and against its import format where one does not.
- E-invoicing portals
- Pre-validation against the coding and formatting rules your largest customers enforce before submission.
- Document storage
- SharePoint, Google Drive, S3 or a file share. Source documents stay where your retention policy says they should.
- Identity
- Your existing SSO, so access follows the same joiner and leaver process as everything else.
What it will not do
- It does not replace your reviewer. It decides what deserves their attention.
- It does not read a ticket nobody filled in. Capture discipline in the field is still a management problem.
- It does not fix an MSA that was badly negotiated. It only enforces the one you signed.
- It does not make your customer pay faster once the invoice is correct and submitted. That part is still a relationship.
Questions
Why not just use Enverus OpenTicket, Pandell or FieldCap?
Often you should, and if one operator has mandated a platform you will be using it regardless. Those products are built for the operator. They automate your customer’s review and approval of your invoice. They do not solve the problem of working for a dozen operators on a dozen different platforms, they do not validate a ticket against your own rate schedules before it is submitted, and they do nothing for the customers still taking tickets by email. We build the layer underneath that feeds all of them. We are not asking you to replace anything.
Some of our operators give us their e-ticketing platform for free. Why pay for anything?
Because free-to-you platforms are free for a reason: you are the supply side of your customer’s procurement system, not the customer. They optimize for the operator’s approval workflow and their coverage stops at that operator’s work. If a platform covered every customer you invoice, you would not need us. In practice it covers one, and your team absorbs the difference.
What is field ticket automation?
Field ticket automation is software that takes a field ticket from the point of work to a billable invoice line without manual re-keying. It captures the ticket in the field, extracts the line items as structured data, validates them against the governing contract and rate schedule, routes anything ambiguous to a human reviewer, and hands the approved result to the billing system.
How accurate is the extraction on handwritten tickets?
Accuracy depends heavily on your specific forms and handwriting, which is why we measure it on your documents during the Audit week rather than quoting you a number from someone else’s operation. What matters more than raw accuracy is calibration: the system should know when it is unsure and escalate, rather than being confidently wrong. We report both.
Do we have to replace our existing ticketing or ERP system?
No, and we would advise against it. This sits between the field and the system you already run. Replacing an ERP is a two-year project with a poor success rate; automating the paperwork feeding it is a six-week project with a measurable return.
Will it work offline?
Yes. Capture works without signal and syncs when the device reconnects, because the alternative is a tool your crews cannot use where your work actually happens.
How long does implementation take?
Six weeks for a single workflow, fixed price. One week before that for the Workflow Audit, which produces a prototype on your own documents and the fixed quote.
Who owns the software at the end?
You do. Source code goes into your repository and the system runs in your own cloud tenant on your own API keys. There are no seat licenses and no revenue share.
See how one of these actually runs.
We publish four engagements written up end to end, a fictional but realistic operator, the before state, what got built, the arithmetic, and the parts that went wrong.