Taking a request and booking the visit

Somebody rings, texts, or turns up. You need their details, the problem, the address, whether it is somewhere you go, what the call-out costs and when you can be there — and you need all of it without creating a second set of records that never quite lines up with the first.

Intake does that in one form, and what comes out is an ordinary job.

Take the request

Add Job on the Jobs page is the one entry point, and it carries the intake fields:

• How they got in touch — Phone, Text, Email, Walk-In, Public Page Lead, Referral, Existing Client or Other.
• The problem, in a sentence.
• The service address.
• When they want it, how urgent it is, and any internal notes.
• Whether you are booking the visit now.

The client is chosen through the same picker used everywhere else, searching by name, business, email or phone — and a phone search matches the digits however the number was typed in, so a client saved as (555) 123-4567 is found by typing 5551234567.

A request that came from your public page keeps its link back to that lead, so the attribution is not lost the moment somebody converts it.

Save and you land on the job’s overview, with the intake summary and the schedule history beside the usual tabs. The Jobs list can tell a service-request job from an ordinary one.

Check the address is somewhere you go

The address field suggests real addresses as you type, and the chosen one is checked against the service zones you have drawn. The answer shows inline as you type it:

• In Area
• Near Boundary
• Out of Area
• Unknown — no zones drawn yet, in which case booking is unaffected

An out-of-area request cannot just be booked. You have to choose what to do with it: mark it Out of Area, record it as a Referral with notes, or Manual Override with a reason, which is recorded so the decision is traceable later.

Address autocomplete and the coverage check need Professional with maps enabled. On Starter you type the address yourself and see guidance rather than a broken control.

How far away is it

Where you have set a primary service area, suggestions show roughly how far the address is from your shop — ~14.2 mi from your shop.

The tilde matters. It is a straight-line distance, not a drive: a river, a lake or a highway with no exit can make fourteen miles into forty. It is there to sort obvious yes from obvious no, not to plan a route. An address with no coordinates shows no distance rather than pretending it is zero miles away.

Draw your service zones

Under Settings → Service Zones, describe where you work in whichever way matches how you think about it:

• ZIP codes, one per line.
• Cities and states, using the same lookup your public service areas use.
• Radius zones anchored to a point.

Quote it later if you need to

Proposal-first is still the better route for bid work. An intake job can back-fill a draft proposal when you decide a client-facing quote is wanted after all — and accepting that proposal links back to the job you already have rather than creating a second one.