Work from your phone

Three things make HappierBiz useful away from the counter: the app on your home screen, notifications, and your work in the calendar you already use. They live together in My work → Work from your phone, and each one tells you whether you have done it yet.

They are numbered because the order matters. On an iPhone or iPad, notifications do not work at all until the app is on the home screen.

1. Put HappierBiz on your phone

Adding it gives you an icon that opens straight into your workspace, stays signed in, and fills the screen like any other app.

On an iPhone or iPad, this only works in Safari. Open your workspace there, tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen, scroll down to Add to Home Screen, then Add. Open it again from the new icon.

On Android, the section shows an Add to my phone button. Tap it and confirm.

On a computer, your browser's address bar usually has an install icon, or the menu has Install. It is optional there; everything works in a normal tab.

The step says "You are in the app now" once it is done on that device, so you never have to work out whether you did it.

Out of signal

HappierBiz saves over the internet as you work, so it needs a connection. With none, a bar near the bottom of the screen says No connection: nothing you do is saved until you are back in signal, and if something did not go through it says so. To work out of range:

• Before you go, add your jobs to your phone's calendar (see See your work in your own calendar), so the time, the address and who it is for are on the phone without signal. Or print the job card from the job.
• Photos and videos taken with the phone's own camera can be added to the job later with Add from phone, under Photos and files on My day.
• Your time: note when you started and finished, and use Started and Finished in Log work once you are back in signal.

2. Your bar

The bar along the bottom of the phone starts with Home and My work, then up to three places of your own, then More. Until you choose, the business's tools come first: Jobs when the business uses Jobs, then the bookings diary and Messages. For someone whose access is their own work, it is Messages and the team's tools.

To change it, open More and press Your bar:

• Add to your bar puts a place on it. When it is full, choose which one it replaces.
• The arrows move a place earlier or later, and the cross takes it off.
• Use the default puts the default back.

Each change saves straight away. Your bar is yours, for this business, on every phone you sign in on. It only offers places you can open, and one you lose access to drops off. Home and My work always stay first.

3. Get told when something needs you

Notifications reach you the moment something happens, even with the app closed: a failed safety check, a customer cancelling, a card declined.

This is per device, not per person. A phone and a tablet are switched on separately, and each shows in Your other devices so you can stop notifying one you no longer use.

What your business sends to each role is set in Settings. What buzzes on your own phone is yours, and nobody else can change it.

4. See your work in your own calendar

Your HappierBiz work, shown in Outlook, Google Calendar, your iPhone calendar or anything else that takes a calendar address, beside everything else in your day.

You get a private address, you add it once, and it keeps itself up to date.

It is a view only copy

HappierBiz stays the one place anything changes. Move a booking here and the entry moves. Cancel it and the entry disappears. Nothing you type in your calendar app can reach back, and there is nothing to connect or sign in to.

How quickly it updates

Your calendar app decides how often it re-reads the address, and none of them are quick. Apple lets you choose. Outlook checks every few hours. Google can take most of a day.

So treat it as the overview, not the alert. Anything you need to know right now still reaches you as a notification and is still on the roster. When you want one thing in your calendar immediately, use the Add to calendar button on that job, which lands straight away. A job over several days arrives as each of its days still to come.

What goes on it

Tick boxes, and you can change them whenever you like:

A layer whose tool your business does not use simply does not appear.

Owners and managers see the whole diary. Everyone else sees only their own work: their shifts, bookings made with them or that they are on the team of, and their own visits to jobs.

A job is an entry for each visit. A job worked over several days, or the days a customer chose after accepting a quote, appears on each of those days at that visit's time. On an owner's or manager's calendar, each one says who is going. A job with a date and no visits yet appears once, on its date, at the time it was booked for; one with only a rough window ("morning") sits at the top of the day with the window written in it.

A booking that opens a job appears once, as the booking. The visit the booking puts in the diary is the same appointment, so with Bookings ticked you see the booking, with everything the customer told you. Without it, you see the job. A visit somebody on the team added, or moved to another time, always appears, and so does one handed to you from somebody else's booking.

The same bookings are listed on My work for the next two weeks, under your business's own word for them (such as My appointments), so you can see your day in the app without the calendar feed. A booking is yours when you are the person it is with (the staff entry in Staff, spaces & equipment has your login as its Team member) or you are on its team. When you are the only person in the business, every booking is yours, whatever it is booked against. A request still waiting shows, marked Awaiting your approval, to somebody who may approve it, and anybody who can open Bookings can press a line to open that booking.

Your own shift is a block in your day. Everybody else's is not. Somebody else being rostered on does not occupy your time, so those sit at the top of the day with the hours written in them, the way a calendar shows anything that lasts all day. Your own shifts, your bookings and your jobs stay in the day itself, which keeps the part you have to turn up to readable.

What an entry carries

The customer and their phone number, what they booked, how many people, the room, everything they answered when they booked (including priced options and extras), whether a deposit or the full amount has been paid, and a link back into HappierBiz.

A booking sits where it happens: at your address when Do customers come to you? is on (Settings → Booking & pricing), at the customer's address for a booking at their place, and with no address for a video call. Your meeting link is never put in an entry.

A job's entry carries the customer and their phone number, the site and its address, the job's notes and the visit's own note, the job number, and a link to the job.

Anything not to be missed is repeated on its own line under the name of the question you asked it with, and is always included whatever else is switched off.

Phone numbers and prices are each a switch the business can turn off.

Site access notes are never included. Gate codes, alarm codes and where the key safe is stay in HappierBiz, behind your login. A calendar entry copies itself to a phone, works offline and needs no password, which is not where a code to get into somebody's house belongs.

Adding it to your calendar

In My work → Work from your phone → step 3 there is a button for each of the common calendars. Use them on the device, or signed in to the account, you want the calendar on.

You set this up once. Every booking, job and shift after it appears on its own, and there is nothing to press again.

It does not matter which email address the calendar is under, and it does not have to match the one you sign in to HappierBiz with. Add the address to as many calendars and accounts as you like: each one reads the same diary.

Using something else, or adding it by hand? Open Adding it by hand, or another calendar, which is where the address itself lives, Copy it, then:

• Outlook: Calendar, then Add calendar, then Subscribe from web.
• Google Calendar: Other calendars, the +, then From URL.
• iPhone or iPad: Settings, Calendar, Accounts, Add account, Other, Add Subscribed Calendar.
• Zoho Calendar: Settings, Calendar, Subscribe, then Web URL.
• Anything else: look for Subscribe, Add from web, or From URL.

It is Subscribe you want, never Import. The two sit next to each other in every calendar app and they do opposite things. Subscribe points your calendar at the address and it re-reads it forever. Import copies today's bookings in once, and that is the end of it.

So do not open the address in a browser. That downloads a file, and a file leaves Import as the only thing your calendar can offer you. The bookings land, they look right, and nothing new ever arrives. A frozen calendar looks exactly like a live one, which is what makes it worth saying.

If you have already imported a copy, delete that calendar and subscribe to the address instead. There is no way to turn an imported one into a live one.

If you lose your phone, and keeping the address yours

The address is a key. Anyone holding it can read that calendar without signing in, so treat it like a password: do not post it anywhere or put it on a shared screen.

• It is yours alone. Nobody, including an owner, can look up somebody else's.
• New address replaces it, which stops the old one working everywhere it has been added. Do this if a phone with it on has been lost, then paste the new one into your calendar.
• It stops working the moment somebody leaves the business.
• The step tells you when your calendar app last read it, so you can see it is working.

Turning it on for the business

An owner or manager switches it on first, under Settings → Connections → Your calendar:

Everyone then sets up their own phone from My work. There is nothing to hand out.

If something is not right