Preparing for a Storm or Other Event

In the unfortunate event of a natural disaster like a hurricane or other large storm, Home Watch IT makes it easy for you to prepare.

We’ll use an example of an impending hurricane for the example, and you can tailor this as necessary.

In our hurricane example, we want to schedule a Pre-Storm visit and a Post-Storm visit for all of our customers. Prepare a SafetyCulture or MonitorQA report for all of the visits and have the reports synced to our device so that we can conduct the inspections even with power and internet outages.

Follow these steps:

1. If you want to notify your customers of the event, and let them know what protocol and steps you will be performing, you can easily send an email to all customers using the Customer List screen. Simply compose a simple email on that screen (no need for a template) and send it to all of your customers with one click. If you are not familiar with the ability to email all your customers, you can learn more at this link.
2. Create an initial Work Order for a Pre-Storm Visit for a client and “clone” the Work Order for the remainder of your clients. When creating the Work Order give it a job name of “Pre-Storm Visit” and make sure to assign your Pre-Storm report template on the Report tab of the Work Order.
   Details of cloning are available User Guide - Cloning Work Orders
3. Create/Start Reports for all of the Work Orders created. You can do this easily from the Admin/Work Order List screen - to do this, select the reports you wish to create by checking the boxes next to each one, select the “Actions on Selected” button and use the Create Reports option. Reports created this way do not automatically store the actual start time, and the reports in either MonitorQA or SafetyCulture will be created with a timestamp the same as the start time on the Work Order. When opening your reporting app you should adjust the time to match the actual time.
4. Make sure you have your SafetyCulture set to our default, recommended settings to store Inspections on Device. You’ll find that on the Settings screen.
5. Allow all of the inspections to sync to the device, or do a manual sync if necessary. In MonitorQA you will see “Available Offline” next to each inspection that is synced to the device.
6. Repeat the above steps for a “Post-Storm Visit” giving it a future date.

Once completed the system will sync and update all Work Orders once internet connectivity is restored. You can send the reports as usual or set the system to send them automatically.

That’s it – best of luck with your event.