Field service compliance

If your trade is regulated, some of what you record is evidence. Compliance is the part of SMG Tools built for that: structured records that cannot be quietly edited afterwards, licenses that warn you before they lapse, and an export in the shape an inspector asks for.

It is off until you add it, because most businesses do not need it and compliance screens nobody uses are only in the way.

Turn it on

Compliance is one of the tools your business chooses: the owner adds it under Tools in the main menu, or with Add at the head of its own page — see Your tools. That is its only switch. Once on, the compliance screens appear through the console, and the license-expiry reminder starts going out. Its settings — when a license is reminded about, and whether an expired one blocks a finalized entry — are under Tools → Compliance → Settings, and can be set before it is added.

Removing it again hides the screens and keeps every record, and the license-expiry reminder stops. Nothing you recorded is deleted by removing a tool — which is the only safe behavior for something you may have to produce years later.

Decide what has to be recorded

Compliance profiles define what a particular kind of regulated work must capture — the fields that are always required, plus the ones specific to that profile. They are on Compliance’s Profiles tab.

Profiles are fixed and versioned. You do not edit them, and that is the point: a record written against a profile two years ago still means exactly what it meant then, which is what makes a set of records comparable at all.

You attach profiles to kinds of work, and from then on a new job of that kind carries them automatically. You can also attach one to an individual job for an edge case, and detach one — unless entries have already been made against it, in which case detaching would orphan evidence.

Keep a catalog of regulated materials

The materials a record names as applied — chemicals, refrigerants, bait stations — are materials in your Price Book, so you keep one list of the things you use. Open a material and, under Regulated details, tick Regulated product and give what its label says: the Registration number, the Signal word, the Active ingredients, a link to its Safety data sheet, its Usual dilution, and whether it is Restricted use. A compliance record offers every regulated material you have on offer, in the material’s own unit and starting from its usual dilution. Untick Regulated product and the material is no longer offered; what you entered is kept. Archive a material you no longer carry, and restore it later. If the Price Book is not on, add it from the Tools page.

These were a separate Materials catalog until it folded into the Price Book. Every catalog entry became a material there — joined to the material that already named it, or made new with its name, unit and category — and the records that named an entry still find it.

A compliance entry keeps a copy of the material’s details as they were when it was recorded. If you later correct a registration number in the Price Book, last year’s record still says what was actually true at the time. A record that silently updates itself is not evidence.

Physical equipment is not a material. Where a serial number has to be on the record — a piece of HVAC equipment, say — it is a field on the profile rather than a material.

Track who is licensed to do the work

Licenses belong to your workers, under Compliance licenses on the Profile tab of each one’s page. A worker with at least one active license is what the screens call a technician — it is a description of their licenses rather than a job title you assign, so it is always current by definition.

A worker can hold several licenses at once. Your business’s own licenses are tracked separately, on Compliance’s Business licenses tab, and support operating across several states.

A business license can be published on your public page as a trust signal, if you choose. Worker licenses are never shown publicly.

Be warned before a license lapses

Expiry reminders run daily and warn you ahead of time, for both worker licenses and your business’s own. Finding out a license expired last week from a regulator is the situation this exists to prevent.

Under Tools → Compliance → Settings, Advance Reminder is how many days before the expiration date the first reminder goes — 30 unless you change it — and a second goes on the date itself. The figure is for licenses: the units at your clients’ properties have their own under Client equipment’s settings.

Capture the work in the field

On a job carrying a profile, the crew fills in the structured record that profile defines, rather than a free-text note. Same fields, same order, same meaning, every time — which is what makes a year of records reportable instead of a year of prose.

If you count your stock with Inventory, a record’s material comes out of it on its own: the amount applied is taken from the applicator’s van and added to the job’s parts used, at what it cost. That happens when the record is in the material’s own unit or its pack — gallons, or cases of four gallons, say. If the record uses another unit, or the applicator has no van, nothing is taken, and the owner and managers find it in For you so they can record it under Used in the job’s Parts and materials panel themselves. Change, delete or restore the record and the part follows it.

Lock what is finished

A finalized compliance record is protected. It is validated before it can be finalized, locked after, and any later change is kept as an amendment with its history rather than overwriting what was there.

That is the difference between a record and a note. A note anybody can revise afterwards proves nothing; a locked record with a visible amendment trail is what holds up.

Export what a regulator asks for

Compliance reports export as CSV in a regulator-facing shape, and the console surfaces where your compliance risk actually is — what is missing, what is expiring — rather than leaving you to find out during an inspection.