The job type is the schema: what a booking code has to carry

A job type is the record binding trade, priority eligibility, expected on-site duration, required skills, capacity class, the questions intake must ask, and the arrival window a customer is promised. Everything downstream reads it. Until whoever took the call has resolved one, there is nothing to schedule, because none of those values exist.

Most operators discover this the slow way. The job type starts as a dropdown filled in during onboarding, grows to 60 entries nobody owns, and then dispatch stops trusting it and starts reading the notes field.

One job type, field by field

Here is a single residential HVAC diagnostic, written as the record it is rather than the label it appears to be.

Read that list and the intake conversation writes itself. Read only the label 'no cooling' and every value becomes a guess made by whoever answered the phone.

Duration is the field that breaks the board

The classic failure: two job types called 'Tune-up'. One is a residential split-system visit at 45 minutes. The other is a rooftop unit on a commercial site at 150 minutes, created by a branch manager 3 years ago. Both read as 'Tune-up' in the picker. An agent books 4 into an afternoon, the technician completes 2, and the 2 customers who slip were never told.

The questions belong to the type, not to the script

Attaching required intake fields to the job type is what makes an intake agent auditable. It is not following a long script; it is filling a record and refusing to book while a required field is empty. A new job type then ships with its own questions instead of inheriting a generic list.

• Residential no-cooling asks whether the system runs at all, thermostat state, breaker state, unit age and whether anyone is home in the window.
• A third-party warranty dispatch asks for an authorisation number and covered scope before anything else, because it is a different object entirely — see why a home warranty dispatch books differently.
• Where answers change the urgency, the type lists only which tiers are permitted; the tier is decided per call using the emergency, urgent, same-day and routine definitions.
• Anything the office would otherwise phone back for is a required field. A callback to ask the unit's age costs more than the question.

Auditing a job type list you inherited

1. Pull 90 days of completed jobs with real on-site minutes and compute p50 and p90 per type. Anything with a p90 above 2.5x p50 is a split candidate.
2. Flag every type used fewer than 10 times in the window. Rare types are usually duplicates with different spellings, and they are what an agent picks by accident.
3. Compare booked duration against actual per type. A type running consistently over its default is the one making every afternoon late.
4. Check each type has an owner, a default duration, a skill tag set and a required-field list. Any type missing one of the four cannot be booked safely by an agent.
5. Retire rather than delete, so historical jobs keep resolving and reporting does not silently change shape.

A structured record an automated caller must fill, with refusal when it cannot, is the containment argument we make in AI agents in production and how we scope intake work in AI agents and automation. It also fixes reporting: attribution needs the job type and the lead source field to be trustworthy, and after-hours jobs are where both go missing — see overnight bookings missing from the morning board. The cluster sits under intake and call capture, within our field service and trades work.

• dispatch
• intake
• scheduling
• data model