Equipment inspections with no phone signal: HireCheck now saves first and uploads later

Plant hire deliveries go to building sites, farms and rural roads. Those are the places phone signal drops out. Until now, HireCheck needed signal to save anything. A driver could spend ten minutes photographing an excavator, tap Save, and lose the lot.

That is fixed. HireCheck now saves the inspection on the phone first, then uploads it. With no signal, it waits on the phone and uploads by itself later.

What the driver sees

1. The driver fills in the inspection and taps Save, same as always.
2. With no signal, HireCheck says "Saved on this phone. It will upload when you have signal."
3. An amber note stays at the bottom of the screen, such as "2 saved on this phone, waiting for signal".
4. When the phone has signal again, the items upload and the note goes away.

The driver does not have to do anything to trigger the upload. HireCheck tries when signal returns, when the app is opened and about once a minute. Tapping the amber note tries straight away.

What is saved with no signal

• Inspections, including photos, checklist answers and the customer licence photo.
• The single customer signature on a delivery or collection. The signed PDF is created when the signature uploads.
• Mark started and Mark done on a delivery, which update HireHop once they upload.

Each item keeps the time it was done on the phone, not the time it uploaded. A check done at 9am that uploads at 4pm still shows 9am. That matters if you ever need the report in a damage dispute.

What you do once

Open HireCheck while you have signal, for example before leaving the yard, and open My Deliveries. HireCheck saves your equipment list, your checklist, your upcoming deliveries and the machines on each job, so the screens open with no signal later. It repeats this each time the phone comes back online.

Adding HireCheck to the phone's home screen helps too. It makes it less likely the phone clears the saved data.

No double entries

The usual problem with retries is a duplicate. The upload reaches the server, the reply gets lost, and the phone sends it again. In HireCheck each inspection, photo and signature carries its own random ID, so the server recognises a repeat and ignores it. You get one record, not two.

What still needs a signal

• Logging in.
• Seeing a delivery that was added after the phone last had signal.
• Opening a signed PDF.
• Adding or editing equipment, imports, and the settings screens.

Logging out removes the saved copy of your data from the phone. Inspections still waiting to upload stay on the phone and are only uploaded by the person who saved them.

iPhones can clear saved website data after about a week of not using it. If a phone has not opened HireCheck for a while, open it once with signal before the next job.

Status

This is new, and I am testing it with a UK plant hire firm that uses HireHop. If something looks odd on your phone, tell me exactly what you saw and I will look into it. It works on the QR inspection page and in the staff app.