How DNS Locks stopped losing 11pm call-outs — a Gothenburg locksmith on FieldApp

For you: you run a locksmith crew and the phone keeps ringing mid-job while quotes, paperwork and invoices pile up on the front seat of the van.

DNS Locks is a four-person locksmith firm in Gothenburg that cuts keys, fits locks and access control, and answers emergency lockouts at every hour of the night. The problem wasn't demand — it was that the business ran on a ringing phone, a notebook on the van dashboard, and a shoebox of jobs waiting to be invoiced.

The 11pm call-out problem

The breaking point was always the same: a tech is on his knees re-pinning a cylinder, both hands busy, and the phone rings. It's someone locked out of a flat in Majorna at 11pm — a job worth more than the one in front of him — and there's no one to catch it. With a single shared mobile and no shared inbox, calls that came in during a job either went to voicemail or vanished. The owner estimated they were quietly losing two or three emergency call-outs a week, the highest-margin work they do.

Everything downstream was just as leaky. Quotes for lock and access-control installs got written up on two evenings a week, by hand, after the kids were in bed. Job notes lived in a notebook, so when an insurance company asked for proof that a break-in repair had actually been done, there was nothing to send. And invoices? They went out in a batch roughly every three weeks, whenever someone found a free Sunday.

From paper to one tap

DNS Locks put their whole operation on FieldApp under their own brand and switched on the pieces that fit a locksmith's day, not a generic checklist.

• Branded online booking. Non-emergency work — key cutting, lock upgrades, a scheduled access-control install — now books itself through a page on their own site. The phone is freed up for the calls that genuinely can't wait.
• Quotes with automatic ROT deduction and e-signature. For private homeowners, FieldApp calculates the Swedish ROT deduction (30% of the labour cost) straight on the quote, so the customer sees the price after the deduction and signs on their phone. No more spreadsheet math at the kitchen table.
• Drag-and-drop scheduling. When an emergency lands, the dispatcher drags it onto whichever tech is closest, and he gets it on his phone instantly.
• The offline field app. In a stairwell with no signal, a tech still runs the job: photos of the broken cylinder before and after, a voice note instead of scribbled handwriting, and the work checklist — all syncing the moment he's back on the street.
• Egenkontroll self-inspection protocols. Access-control and lock installs close out with a signed-off inspection protocol, so the proof exists before anyone leaves site.
• Same-day invoicing with Fortnox sync. The signed quote, logged hours and photos roll into an invoice that goes out before the van is back at the shop, then syncs to Fortnox automatically.

The geofenced time clock quietly took over the part nobody enjoyed: techs clock in when they reach the site, so night call-outs and overtime land in payroll correctly without anyone reconstructing the week from memory.

What changed in 90 days

Inside three months the difference was hard to argue with.

• 0 missed call-outs. With booking off the main line and emergencies dispatched in the app, the two-or-three lost call-outs a week went to none.
• Quotes: from two evenings a week to about 20 minutes a day. Pre-built line items and automatic ROT turned the worst admin job into a few taps between visits.
• Invoices same-day instead of every three weeks. Cash that used to sit in the shoebox now arrives weeks earlier, and the Fortnox sync ended the manual re-typing.
• Every insurance job has proof. Photos, voice notes and a signed egenkontroll mean an insurer's request is answered in minutes from the customer's job history, not "I'll have to dig that out."

"I used to do paperwork instead of sleeping. Now the quote is signed before I leave the driveway and the invoice is gone before I'm back. I stopped dreading the phone." — owner, DNS Locks

The small thing that made the day feel calmer

Two features the team didn't expect to love. The customer status portal cut the "are you still coming?" calls — a locked-out customer can see their job confirmed and the tech on the way, which matters at midnight. And the built-in AI assistant drafts the quote description and tidies a rushed voice note into a clean job summary, so even the after-hours paperwork reads like someone calm wrote it.

None of this required a bigger team or a new website — just one operating system doing the catching, the quoting, the proof and the invoicing that used to fall through the cracks. If you run a locksmith business and you're tired of losing call-outs to a busy line and chasing your own invoices, this is the setup that fixes it. Try FieldApp free for 14 days and run your next emergency job through it.