Drop work is volume. Dozens of small jobs a week, arriving from more than one source, each one driven to, closed out, and billed. The mechanism keeps that list in one place, has the crew mark the map and submit from the site, and lets the submitted map show the job is done instead of a phone call.
Book a Fit CallJobs come in through two paths in two formats. Tickets and work orders come out of the customer's portal export. The calendar gets scanned by hand every day to catch the ones added later. That second pass exists because the first source cannot be trusted on its own, and somebody has to reconcile the two so nothing is duplicated and nothing is missed.
Then every completed job gets updated twice: once in the portal and once on the tracking sheet. Open tickets are chased by calling subs. There is no status feed, so knowing where a job stands means calling the crew or reading line by line through what the subs turned in that week.
The part that carries the most risk is not the time. It is the job that was added to the calendar, missed, and is sitting past due before anyone knows it exists.
The mechanism is the same in every market. A job lands on one list once, and everything downstream, the marked map and the tally, lands on that record.
Each job goes on one list, with the job number, the PO, and the address entered once.
The office sets up each job once, with the map the crew will mark.
The crew opens the job's map, marks it on site, and submits once. The tally comes from the marks.
Billing codes and quantities come off the marks the crew submitted, so the tally is ready for the invoice without a second round of data entry. Each line is priced from your price book. The Drop Production package is on the pricing page.
The test: pick one job that closed last week and ask three questions. When did it come in, and when did the crew submit it? How far did the crew drive from the job before it? Where are the photos? If any answer is "let me check with the crew," that is where the day goes.
One day, one address, one bury. The tally is ready for the invoice.
Working drops in the order they came in can send crews back and forth across the same territory. In rural markets the drive between jobs can be long. Drive time is paid time that never reaches an invoice.
The order the crew works the list is still the dispatcher's call. What one list changes is everything after the drive: the crew marks the map and submits from the site, the tally comes from the marks, and the office sees the priced tally instead of rebuilding the job a week later.
None of this is a product feature. It is six conditions on how the job list is kept. You may already meet one or two of them.
The office adds each job to one list, whichever place it came from, so there are not two lists to match each day.
Check each new export against last month's finished jobs, so nobody works a repeat twice.
The record shows what was placed and when it was submitted, so nobody types it in later.
On a phone, where they open the job's map, mark it, and submit from the site. Not from a chat thread.
A job is done when the crew marks the map and submits it.
Keep finished jobs off the working list, and keep past-due jobs where you can see them.
If the plan is to take on more work, the tracking method that is straining today is the constraint. More volume through a manual process means more missed jobs, not more revenue.
The cleaner path is to make the existing crews more productive first. That also makes the added volume absorbable without adding admin on the office side.
There is no drop bury package to buy here. The customer's export formats, the sub arrangements, and the crew habits are yours, and the build has to fit them or the crews route around it.
The Operations Audit traces one week of drop work from the export to the invoice and shows where the list is being rebuilt by hand, where the duplicates come from, and what would have to change for the submitted map to show a job is done. The usual first step after that is a single market as a pilot, one account only. Prove it there, then duplicate the setup market by market, adjusted for what each one needs to see. That keeps the initial commitment small and gives you something real to point at before anyone commits further.
The last piece of a fiber build: the buried drop from the pedestal or hand hole to the customer's home or business. One address, usually one day, and a high volume of them across a market. The work is small. The list is what gets out of hand.
Usually a ticket or work order export from the customer's portal, plus jobs added to a shared calendar after the export ran. The office sets up each job on one list, with its job number, PO, address, and the map the crew will mark, so the crew works from that list instead of the calendar.
The marked-up map the crew submitted is on the job record, not in a folder on somebody's phone. The record shows what was placed and when it was submitted. That is the answer to the dispute.
A drop bury crew buries the fiber line that runs from the pedestal or hand hole to one home or shop. Some ISPs run a temporary line first. The crew buries it later. Before anyone digs, the crew needs an 811 locate ticket. Each job is usually one address and one day.
By the codes in your contract. A drop is often billed as one unit. A long run, a bore or a road crossing can carry its own code. Your price book has the code and the rate for each one. Each invoice line is the code, times the quantity, at that rate. Check your contract for the details.
Jobs come in from two places: the customer's portal export and jobs added to the calendar later. Someone often has to match the two by hand each day. Miss one, and a job sits past due. Count one twice, and a crew drives to a job that is done. Keep both on one list and check it each day.
Whatever your ISP's contract asks for. That often means the work order number, the marked map with codes and quantities, the 811 ticket, and photos of the bury and the cleanup. Get the list before the first job. When the crew turns it in on the day, the office can bill without a phone call.
The office sets up each job once, with its project number, PO, address and map. The crew marks the map on a phone at the site and submits it. The tally comes from the marks. It is priced from your price book, ready for the invoice. To see how it works on drop jobs, Book a Fit Call.
The job record itself is one record per job. Multi-day construction runs on the same four steps at map to invoice. The billing side is billing automation for ISP contractors. To put a number on the office lag, run the cash flow and factoring calculator, and the ROI calculator for the admin hours. Passing work down: sub invoicing.
Would it be a bad idea to spend 30 minutes tracing one week of drop work from the export to the invoice? Free 30-minute Fit Call. We will tell you whether an Operations Audit is a fit.
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