How tos

Article 01

Check in to a job site

A location visit is the record of when a technician was on site. Checking in takes one tap, and Alpha verifies your location against the site's geofence so the record reflects whether you were actually there.

Check in

1. On your phone, open My Work — or use the check-in pill in the header from anywhere in the app.
2. Tap Check in and pick the site if you aren't asked about just one.
3. Alpha records your current coordinates. Inside the geofence, the visit is verified as on-site; outside it, the visit is flagged off-site — useful for shop work or pickups. The geofence radius is set per location when you create it.

Tap the pill again to check out when you leave.

Article 02

Move a project through the pipeline

Projects flow through a 10-state lifecycle from draft through closed. You change the status from the project's edit form.

Steps

1. Open the project.
2. Click Edit.
3. Choose the new status and save. The activity feed records who changed it and when.

Article 03

Add attachments to a project

Photos, PDFs, signed estimates — anything you'd staple to a folder can live on the project. Files are stored natively in Alpha; you don't need Drive for this.

1. Open the project's full view and find the Attachments panel.
2. Click Upload to pick files from your device.
3. On a phone, tap Add photo to capture straight from the camera.

Article 04

Comment on a project

Every project has a comment thread. Use it instead of texting or email so the conversation lives with the job.

1. Open the project.
2. Scroll to the Comments section at the bottom.
3. Type your message and hit send. Teammates with access to the project get a notification in their inbox.

Mention a teammate

To pull a specific person into the conversation, mention them. They get a higher-signal "you were mentioned" notification and an email — even if they wouldn't normally be following the thread.

1. While writing a comment, type @ and start typing a name.
2. Pick the person from the list that appears. Their name is highlighted in your message so it's clear who you tagged.
3. Send the comment. Each mentioned person gets a notification and an email linking straight to the thread.

You can mention more than one person in a single comment, and you can add a mention when editing a comment — only the newly added person is notified, so no one gets pinged twice.

Article 05

Connect QuickBooks Online

Connecting QuickBooks lets Alpha pull customer records and estimates so you don't have to type them twice.

1. In the sidebar, open Admin → Integrations.
2. Find the QuickBooks Online card and click Connect.
3. Sign in with your QuickBooks Online account and pick the company file.
4. Approve the requested permissions (read customers, items, estimates, and invoices).

Once connected, open the QuickBooks card to import your customers and items. From then on, Alpha keeps synced records — customers, items, and estimates — up to date in the background as they change in QuickBooks.

Send a work order to QuickBooks

You can also go the other way: push a project's work order to QuickBooks as an estimate. Open the project and click Send estimate in the Work order panel — the project's customer needs to be linked to QuickBooks first. After that, Sync changes pushes your line-item edits to the same estimate. If the estimate changed in QuickBooks since your last sync, Alpha warns you before overwriting and lets you pull the QuickBooks version in instead. Owners, admins, and project managers can send estimates.

Article 06

Connect Google Drive

Drive integration creates a per-project folder in your Drive and lets you upload files straight into it from the project page — so your existing folder workflow keeps working alongside Alpha.

1. In the sidebar, open Admin → Integrations.
2. On the Google Drive card, click Connect.
3. Choose the Google account whose Drive should host the folders. This is separate from your Alpha sign-in.
4. Pick (or create) the parent folder where Alpha should put project folders. We recommend a fresh folder called something like Alpha Projects.

To give a project its own Drive folder, open the project's full view and click Create folder in the Drive panel. Files you add there are uploaded straight into the Drive folder, and Alpha keeps each project's folder organized under its customer.

Article 07

Change a teammate's role

Roles control what each teammate can see and change. Alpha ships with six — see Roles and permissions for the full breakdown of what each role can do.

Steps

1. In the sidebar, open Admin → Team.
2. Find the person you want to change.
3. Pick the new role from the role selector next to their name. Elevations to Owner or Admin show a confirmation prompt because they grant broad access.