From New Account to First Field Report: A Full Walkthrough

This walkthrough sets up a Sitefotos account from scratch and follows it all the way to the first report arriving from the field. We use a fictional company, Ridge Works, and build the same thing you will: a few sites, a couple of services and materials, one employee and one contractor, and a single form the crew fills out on site. By the end, a real submission from the mobile app lands on the Service History page.

1. Sign In to the Backoffice

Sign in at www.sitefotos.com with the email address and password you created when you signed up. The backoffice is where everything in this walkthrough happens until the final step.

2. Find Your Company ID

Open Account Settings and look at the Profile tab. Two codes matter for the mobile app: the Company ID and the shorter Short ID. Field users sign in to the app with one of these codes plus their email address, so you will need one of them in step 8. Both have copy buttons, and both are case sensitive.

3. Add Your Sites

Open Sites and click New Site. Start typing the address into the search box and pick the suggested match: the address fields and the map fill in automatically.

Sitefotos draws a geofence around the property. Drag its corner handles to match the actual boundary, give the site a name, and click Save. The geofence is what later tells the app how far a user is from each site.

Repeat for the rest of your properties. Ridge Works ends up with three sites, all active.

4. Define Your Services

Open Services and click New Service. Pick the trade, give the service the name your team uses, and map it to one of the built-in internal services so reporting stays consistent. Ridge Works adds Snow Plowing (mapped to Push Lots) and Salting (mapped to Deice Lots).

5. Add Materials

Open Materials. Depending on your trade, the account may already include a starter list; you can add your own with New Material. A material is just a name plus the unit you count it in, for example Bagged Rock Salt counted in Bags.

6. Add Your People

Under CRM, add the people who will use Sitefotos. Employees are your own team; contractors are outside companies that work for you. The two are created in almost the same way, but they behave differently in the app later.

For an employee, CRM > Employees > New Employee. First name, last name, and email address are all a field user needs to sign in to the app. The same screen also holds per-person mobile app settings and website login permissions.

For a contractor, CRM > Contractors > New Contractor. Fill in the person, their company, and their email address. Then use Assign Sites on the contractor record to choose which sites they should see. Ridge Works assigns Riley two of the three sites and deliberately leaves the third off.

The contractor record now lists exactly the sites they are allowed to work. Site assignment is the single most common reason a contractor cannot see a site in the app, so it is worth getting right on day one.

7. Build the Form

Open Form Builder and create a new form. Drag fields from the palette on the left into the phone preview: the preview is exactly what field users will see. The Ridge Works form uses two Service fields (one wired to Snow Plowing, one to Salting), an Add Materials field, a paragraph for site notes, and a Site Info block.

• Service fields are what turn a submission into service history: each checked service becomes a service record.

• The Add Materials field lets the crew log which materials they used and how much.

• Under Permissions, choose who can use the form and which sites it applies to. Everyone and All Sites is the simplest starting point.

Name the form and click Save.

8. Sign In on the Mobile App

Now switch to the phone. Your field user installs the Sitefotos app, then signs in with their email address (the one on their contact record) and the Company ID from step 2. There is no app password: the email plus the code is the whole login.

After sign-in, the app shows the sites the user can see, sorted by distance. An employee sees the account's sites; a contractor sees only their assigned sites.

9. Complete a Site Visit

Tapping a site checks the user in and opens the form assigned to it. This is the form built in step 7, exactly as the preview showed it.

The crew checks off the services performed, and taps the plus on Add Materials to log what was used. The material list comes straight from step 5.

With services checked, materials counted, and a note in the box, the visit is ready to submit.

Tap Submit. The app confirms and returns to the site list.

10. Watch the Work Arrive

Back in the backoffice, open Service History. The submission from the app has already created one service record per checked service: Snow Plowing and Salting, both in Logged status, with Mobile as the source. From here an administrator reviews and approves them, and they flow on into reporting and invoicing.