Flex User Manual

Flex runs the office side of a trade business: the jobs you quote, the crew you schedule, the parts you fit, the invoices you send and the money you collect.

This is the reference manual — it explains what each part of the system does and why it behaves the way it does. If you are setting up for the first time and just want to get moving, read the Getting Started walkthrough instead. It covers the same ground in fifteen minutes with screenshots. The search box on the left searches both.

Overview

Everything in Flex hangs off one thing: the job. A job starts as an estimate, gets scheduled, gets worked, gets invoiced, and gets paid. Parts, labour, crews, stock and reports all exist to serve that line.

That matters when you are deciding where something belongs. If you find yourself asking "where do I put this?", the answer is almost always "on the job".

Where Flex runs

All three show the same organization's data. A job written on the web is on the tech's phone; a photo taken on the phone is on the web.

One organization, many people

Your company is an organization. Everything — customers, items, jobs, invoices — belongs to it, and nothing leaks between organizations. People are users inside it, each with their own login and their own level of access.

Add your people as their own users rather than sharing one login. A shared login makes the schedule meaningless (everyone is "assigned"), makes job history untraceable, and means letting someone go requires changing a password everyone knows.

First-time setup

The first time an owner or admin signs in, Flex puts a checklist on the dashboard. It tracks itself — steps tick off when the underlying data exists, you never mark them done by hand.

"I'll finish later" hides the checklist permanently. Nothing is lost — every item on it stays reachable from Settings.

What to call a ticket

Under business defaults you choose the word your shop uses — job, ticket, work order. Flex uses your word everywhere in the interface. This manual says job.

Customers

A job needs a customer, so customers come first.

Beyond name, phone and address, two fields do real work later:

• Payment terms — Net 15, Net 30, Due on Receipt. This carries onto every invoice for that customer automatically. Set a property manager to Net 30 once and every invoice they ever get says Net 30.
• Tax exempt — set it on the customer and their invoices stop charging tax. Churches, schools and non-profits need this. Setting it here rather than per-invoice means nobody has to remember on a busy Friday.

A service address can differ from the billing address — the café you bill at head office but service on Haywood Road.

Open a customer to see their whole history: every job, every invoice, what they still owe. This is the screen for "you were out here last spring" phone calls.

Jobs

The six stages

Every job carries a progress bar showing exactly where it stands:

Estimate → Schedule → Work → Complete → Invoice → Paid

Underneath it, a band tells you the next action and gives you the buttons to do it. If you are ever unsure what a job needs, that band is the answer.

Statuses

Flex refuses status jumps that make no sense — a job cannot go from Draft straight to Paid. If a change is rejected while syncing from a phone, the server's version wins and the device is told why.

Writing an estimate

Pick the customer, choose a job type (repair, installation, maintenance), and describe the work in plain words. That description is what the customer reads, so write it for them, not for yourself.

Two ways to finish: Save Estimate keeps it as a draft you can come back to and publish from the job page. Create & Publish does the whole thing in one go — the job is created and published immediately, and if you gave it a date it lands straight on the schedule. If it cannot be published yet (nothing on it to charge for), Flex still creates it as a draft and tells you why.

Then add what it costs:

• Material items from your catalog. Once committed they show as Reserved, so they stop counting as available stock elsewhere.
• Labor charges — hours against one of your labour rates.
• Custom charges — anything that is neither, like a disposal fee.

Flex totals it, applies your tax rule and shows the figure as you build.

A job discount applies to the whole job. Tax is calculated after it, so the customer is not taxed on money they did not pay.

Estimate checklists

Under Estimate Checklists you can build a standard list of things to check before quoting a type of work. Attach it to a job and the tech fills it in on site, so the person writing the quote is working from what is actually there rather than what was described over the phone.

Assigning work

Assign a job to a person or to a crew. Crews (under Crews & Groups) are people who normally work together — an install pair booked as one thing rather than two.

Assignment is what puts the job on someone's phone. An unassigned job appears on the dispatch board waiting for someone to take it.

Scheduling and dispatch

Schedule is the week: every job with a date, laid out per person or crew. Use it for planning.

Dispatch Board is today: who is on what, what is unassigned, what has not been started. Use it when the phone rings and someone has no heat.

Scheduling a job moves it to Scheduled and it appears on the assigned tech's phone at their next sync.

Scheduling is a module. If the Schedule and Dispatch Board menu items are missing, turn Scheduling on under Modules.

Items and inventory

Two different ideas, and confusing them causes most inventory trouble:

• Items is your catalog — what a 3-ton condenser is, what it costs you, what you sell it for. One catalog entry however many you own.
• Inventory is the physical stock — how many you actually have and where they are sitting.

You can sell without tracking stock at all. Plenty of shops only want the catalog for pricing.

Item templates and properties

An item template defines the shape of a kind of item — which properties it carries, such as Manufacturer, Model, Cost and Unit Price. Items built from a template all carry the same fields, so you can filter and price consistently.

Calculated properties work out a value from other properties rather than being typed in — a sell price derived from cost and a margin, for example. Change the cost and the price follows.

Item categories group the catalog for browsing and reporting.

Bundle Templates and Kits appear in the menu marked coming soon. They are not available yet.

Locations

A location is anywhere stock sits: a building, a room, a shelf, or a van. They nest — a main shop containing a parts room and a refrigerant cage, plus three vans.

Location types control behaviour. A job site location consumes stock: parts moved there are treated as used rather than stored.

Transfers

Moving stock between locations is a transfer. Reserving parts for a job that needs them on site raises one automatically.

Transfers can require approval before they take effect, so stock does not quietly leave the shop. A transfer stays Pending until approved.

Barcodes

Items can carry a barcode. The phone app scans it to pull the item up, which beats typing a model number in a crawl space. Both 1D barcodes (the striped kind on retail packaging) and QR codes work.

Purchasing

• Vendors — who you buy from.
• Purchase Orders — what you have ordered.
• Shipments — what has arrived. Receiving against a PO brings the stock into a location.

Labor rates

Under Labor Rates, set up the ways you charge for time:

• Hourly — standard service, after-hours, installation.
• Flat — a diagnostic call, a tune-up, a trip charge.

Adding labour to a job pulls from this list, so a price rise is one edit rather than a hunt through open jobs.

Invoicing and payments

Creating an invoice

From a completed job, Generate Invoice builds the bill from what is already on the job — the parts used, the labour logged, your tax rule, and that customer's payment terms. Nothing is retyped, so nothing is mistyped.

You can also write a standalone invoice not attached to a job, for a straight sale.

Sending it

Email it from Flex, save a PDF, or print it. The customer-facing version shows your company details, the line items, terms and payment instructions — not your internal notes or costs.

Recording payment

Record Payment logs what came in and how — check, cash, card. You can record:

• Partial payments. Flex tracks the balance and the invoice stays open until settled.
• Down payments taken before work starts.

Recording payment in full is what finally moves the job to Paid.

Notes

Invoice notes can be marked internal. Internal notes never appear on what the customer sees — use them for "customer disputes the trip charge" rather than putting it in the body.

Invoice list

The invoice list is your receivables: who has paid, who has not, and how overdue they are. Filter to unpaid and work down it.

Getting it into QuickBooks

Flex exports invoices as a CSV that QuickBooks imports directly. The export deliberately refuses any invoice whose line items do not add up to the invoice total, and tells you which one and by how much, rather than quietly exporting a figure your books cannot explain. Draft, cancelled and consolidated invoices are excluded.

Reports

Revenue, outstanding receivables, and what jobs actually earned once parts and labour came out. Worth ten minutes on a Friday.

The Who Owes Us section is a receivables aging: every unpaid invoice's balance, per customer, bucketed by how many days past its due date it is (current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+). It is a snapshot as of today and ignores the report date range. Click a customer to open them, or the list icon to see just their unpaid invoices.

The field app

Technicians get the same account on an Android app, built for standing in front of a furnace.

• Their own work only. A tech sees the jobs assigned to them and their own schedule — not the whole shop's week and not the books.
• Works with no signal. Crawl spaces and mechanical rooms have no bars. The app keeps working and syncs when the phone finds a connection.
• Barcode scanning for parts.
• Photos and signatures attach to the job, so the office sees the work and the sign-off without a group text.
• "On my way" texts the customer without giving out the tech's personal number.

Download it from flexonthejob.com. Each tech signs in with their own account.

Customer texting is a module — turn on Text Messaging under Modules. Messages are sent by the server, which re-checks every one, so a text cannot be sent by a device that has gone stale.

Users, roles and permissions

Add people under Users. Each gets a role:

Access is decided by permissions, not job title, and roles are just a starting bundle of them. A custom role can hold any set you like: under Roles, create one, tick the permissions it should carry, then put people in it with Assign Users (or from the person's roles on the Users page). You can only hand out permissions you hold yourself. A change to a role applies the next time each person signs in.

One distinction worth understanding: seeing the whole shop is supervisory. Admins and managers see every job and everyone's schedule. A technician sees their own. This is deliberate — a tech does not need the crew's week or the company's revenue to do their job.

Settings

Under Organization you set the defaults that the rest of the system inherits:

• Business details and the reply-to address on outgoing email
• Tax rate, and whether tax applies to materials only or to labour as well
• Default payment terms
• What you call a ticket
• Invoice appearance and payment instructions

Changing a default affects new records. Existing jobs and invoices keep the terms they were written with, which is what you want — an invoice should not silently change after it was sent.

Modules

Modules turns optional parts of the system on and off: Scheduling, Text Messaging, and industry packs. If a menu item you expect is missing, look here first.

Import Data

Import Data brings a spreadsheet in — usually your item catalog or customer list. Map your columns to Flex's fields. Import into a test run first and check the result before doing the real one; an import is much easier to avoid than to unpick.

API keys and webhooks

For connecting other software:

• API keys authenticate another system against your organization. A key carries a subset of its creator's permissions, is shown once when created, and is stored only as a hash — if you lose it, issue a new one.
• Webhooks push a message to a URL you choose when something happens, so another system can react without polling.

Both are under Settings. If you are not integrating anything, ignore them.

Billing

Your subscription is under Billing.

Suspension never deletes anything. Your data is intact and becomes writable again the moment billing is settled. While suspended you can still reach Billing and your account, and devices stop pushing changes until it clears.

Add a billing email on the organization — trial and payment warnings go there. Without one the first sign of trouble is the system going read-only.

Troubleshooting

A menu item is missing. Either the module is off (Modules) or your role does not have the permission. Ask whoever administers your account.

The phone shows old data. It syncs when it has a connection. Open the app with signal and give it a moment. Work done offline is not lost — it is queued.

A job will not move to the status I want. Flex refuses transitions that skip required stages. Follow the band at the top of the job; it names the next legal step.

Stock counts look wrong. Check for pending transfers. Stock committed to a job shows as Reserved and is deliberately not counted as available.

An invoice total does not match the job. A job discount, a tax rule covering materials only, or a customer marked tax exempt will each do this. All three are visible on the job's financial summary.

The QuickBooks export skipped an invoice. It refuses invoices whose lines do not reconcile with the total, and names them. Fix the invoice and export again.

Everything is read-only. Billing is suspended. See Billing.

Glossary

Getting help

Search first. The box at the top left searches this manual and the Getting Started walkthrough together. Most pages in Flex also have a Need help? link beside the title that opens the matching section here — and, when you read the manual inside Flex, sections that describe a screen carry a Take me there link that opens that screen in a new tab.

Email support is included with every account: support@flexonthejob.com. A real person reads it and replies within one business day. If something looks wrong, say what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead — that is almost always enough to find it. Bug fixes are never charged.

Support blocks

When you'd rather have something done for you — the initial setup, a customer or price-book import, a training session for the office or the crew — buy a support block: a block of hands-on hours from someone who knows Flex and knows the trades. It's a one-time purchase, unused hours never expire, and nothing about your subscription changes.