Operatives

An operative is a lightweight workforce record for field work — a name and a way to reach them is enough to make someone assignable, with a real sign-in only minted the moment they actually need one.

What it is

Quick-adding an operative creates a member record with no Firebase sign-in account at all — assignable and schedulable immediately. Most never need an account: a coordinator can record their job’s completion on their behalf from the portal. Only once an operative genuinely needs to use the field app themselves — to capture their own after-photo and GPS fix — do you activate them, which mints a real account with a server-generated password, forced to be changed at first sign-in.

Before you start

Quick-adding, activating or changing an operative’s status needs Edit-level access to Work orders — deliberately a lower bar than Module-admin access to Members, since operatives are workforce resources that come and go per work type, not a governance-sensitive role change.

How to do it

1. From the assignee picker on a works order, click Quick-add an operative and enter a name plus either an email or a phone number, and their engagement type (staff, contractor, subcontractor).
2. They’re assignable straight away. If they need to use the field app themselves, open their record and Activate — this mints their sign-in and shows a one-time password to hand over.
3. To pause someone temporarily, set their status to Invited rather than Archived — this disables an already-activated account’s sign-in immediately without losing the record.
4. Use Archived, not deletion, to retire an operative who’s genuinely finished — this keeps their history on record rather than erasing it.

How it integrates

An operative’s portal capability set is empty by design — like a surveyor, their access to Work orders and Scheduling is scoped to jobs actually assigned to them, never organisation-wide. Moving an already-activated operative out of Active immediately disables and revokes their sign-in session, not just their status label, so access stops the moment you change it, not at their next token refresh. Operatives are never billed — see Seats: what is billed and what is free — quick-adding one runs no seat check at all.

Common problems

• An operative I archived can still sign in. Check whether they’d ever been activated at all — a never-activated operative has no account to disable in the first place, so archiving them is purely a record-status change; an activated one’s sign-in is disabled immediately on archiving.
• I want to give an operative broader access, like viewing dashboards. Use Granular permissions on their record for a per-person override — their role baseline stays empty, but an explicit grant can still add specific administrative access if genuinely needed.
• An operative’s email looks wrong, like it ends in “unclaimed.housingsurvey.pro”. That’s a synthetic placeholder address used when no real email was given at quick-add or activation time — it can’t receive mail; add a real one if they need genuine email contact.