When a device didn’t sync: finding missing field work
When field work seems to be missing, check the job pages for what actually landed, then open the crew app on the phone that did the work — its sync line shows what is still waiting, and any connection at all lets it deliver the backlog on its own.
It’s eight in the morning, the crew swears they finished the whole north arm yesterday, and the office screens show half of it still pending. Before anyone re-marks anything or anyone’s memory goes on trial, walk this order. It almost always ends at step two.
1. See what actually landed
Open one of the jobs in question. Every tap that reached the office is on it — which items, marked by whom, at what time, and the clock’s minutes with them. The account’s activity feed shows the same events in order. If some of yesterday is there and the rest stops mid-afternoon, that’s not lost work — that’s the moment the boat left signal, and the rest is still on the phone.
2. Look at the phone that did the work
Open the crew app on that device. The sync line at the top tells you the whole story: Synced means everything the device holds has been delivered — whatever you were expecting was never tapped. A count still waiting, or “Will sync later”, means the work is sitting right there, safe, waiting for bars.
The fix is any connection at all — the shop wifi counts. The app sends the backlog on its own the moment it’s open and online; you can watch the count fall. There’s nothing to press and no order to preserve; the office ends up with everything, stamped with the time it actually happened on the water.
While a count is showing, protect that phone’s storage. Don’t clear the browser’s site data, and don’t delete the app from the phone — the waiting work lives there. Force-quitting to “make it sync” does nothing either; open, online, and patient is the whole procedure.
3. “To retry” and the rare one that cannot land
A status like “2 to retry” means those taps made it off the phone but couldn’t land yet; the app keeps trying on its own. Once in a while one can never land, because the world changed while the boat was out — the job was canceled from the office that afternoon, say. That tap isn’t thrown away: LakeOps keeps exactly what the phone sent, and support can read it back with you, so the crew’s side of the story is never simply gone. If a day ends with work you can’t account for between the job pages and the device, get in touch.
4. When work is genuinely at risk
One case: the phone itself is gone — over the side, stolen, wiped — before it ever came back into signal. Taps that never left the device exist only on the device. Everything it had already delivered that day is safe in the office, and the day pack re-downloads to any replacement phone in one tap; what’s lost is the unsent taps, and that is the honest extent of it.
That’s why the one habit worth drilling is the ride home: somewhere on the drive the bars come back, and a crew member who opens the app for ten seconds has emptied the boat’s whole day into the office. What the phone is doing underneath — resends that can’t double, offline timers, what waits for signal — is in working with no signal.
Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.