Using the Home Screen
Home is normally the first screen you see when you open ABM Service: a one-page summary of the calls logged and the engineer visits due in a period, with today's visits laid out by engineer. You can come back to it at any time by opening the menu and choosing Home. It is ABM's Calls & Actions Dashboard, rebuilt for ABM Service.
What is on the Home screen?
The Home screen is a dashboard of four panels that summarise your calls and your engineers' work, with the controls that decide what they count above them. It is where ABM Service opens when you start it. From the top down you will see:
- Menu — the button at the top left, before the greeting, which opens the ABM Service menu: the screens, Appearance, and Sign out in a web browser.
- The greeting — "Good morning", "Good afternoon" or "Good evening" with your name, and underneath it Service desk at followed by your company's name.
- Four buttons — Customers, Calls, Scheduler and Log a call, which take you straight to those screens.
- The period bar — the pills Today, This week, This month and This year, with arrows either side to step back and forward, and a line saying which dates are being counted.
- Counting rules — four dropdowns, Call types, Open, Active and Closed, that decide which calls are counted and how they are grouped. These are your own and are saved for you.
- Calls by status and Actions by status — two panels, each with four tiles (Open, Active, Completed, Cancelled) and a coloured bar.
- Today on the board — one line per engineer showing the visits due today.
- The grouping card — the busiest engineers, customers or call types in the period, switched with Type, Customer and Engineer.
The screen is built to fit the window without scrolling the page. When a panel has more lines than it can show, that panel scrolls on its own.
How do I get to the Home screen?
Home opens automatically when you start ABM Service, unless you opened ABM Service from ABM straight to a call, a customer or another screen. You can return to it from the Calls list, the Customers list or the Scheduler by opening the menu and choosing Home.
- Select Navigation menu at the top of the filter rail on the Calls, Customers or Scheduler screen.
- Choose Home, the first entry in the menu, above Customers, Calls and Scheduler.
The call screen and the customer screen have no menu: use the back arrow at their top left to return to the screen you came from, and open the menu there. The back arrow is only there when there is somewhere to go back to; if you opened the call or customer straight from a link, a bookmark or a new tab, open your company's ABM Service web address instead, which opens on Home. In the ABM Service desktop app, Go in the title bar also offers Home.
There is no setting to make ABM Service start on a different screen, such as the Calls list. In a web browser you can bookmark that screen instead: a bookmark to a screen opens on it, asking you to sign in first when you need to. Otherwise, from Home, the Calls, Customers and Scheduler buttons at the top of the screen take you there in one click.
The browser tab's title (or, in the ABM Service desktop app, the window's taskbar button) shows Home while you are on it. Each time you open Home it starts afresh on This week with the grouping card on Engineer; your counting rules, on the other hand, are remembered, because they are saved for you.
Where do the buttons at the top of the Home screen go?
The four buttons in the top-right of the Home screen are shortcuts to the main screens of ABM Service. They are the same places you can reach from the menu.
- Customers — opens the Customers list.
- Calls — opens the Calls list.
- Scheduler — opens the Scheduler board.
- Log a call — starts a new call, the same as New Call on the Calls list.
There is one more shortcut on the Home screen: Open the Scheduler → in the corner of the Today on the board panel.
Can I click the numbers on the Home screen?
No — apart from customer names, the numbers, tiles, bars and rows on the Home screen are for reading only and do not open anything. Clicking the Open tile, an engineer's row or a call type's row does nothing in this version.
The things on the Home screen that do take you somewhere are:
- the four buttons at the top (Customers, Calls, Scheduler, Log a call);
- Open the Scheduler → on the Today on the board panel;
- a customer's name on the grouping card when it is set to Customer — select the name to open that customer, or use the small open-in-new button beside it to open the customer in a new tab (or a new window in the desktop app).
To see the calls behind a number, go to the Calls list and filter it there.
The Home screen is not a report either: ABM Service has no reports screen in this version, and nothing on Home exports its figures to Excel or to a file, or prints them. To count the calls you want, filter the Calls list by call type, status, engineer, customer and date, and read the count at the foot of the Calls list. That count is of rows: with All or Scheduled chosen under Which calls, a call with two engineers scheduled is counted twice, once for each visit, while To schedule counts calls.
Why do my Home screen numbers differ from a colleague's?
Your Home screen numbers can differ from a colleague's because the counting rules are personal: each ABM user chooses which call types are counted and which call statuses count as Open, Active and Closed. Two people looking at the same week can therefore see the same calls split differently across the Open, Active and Completed tiles of the Calls by status panel and on the grouping card's bars. If their Call types differ, the totals differ too.
The counting rules do not change the Actions by status panel or the Today on the board panel, apart from Call types, which narrows those too. The period also matters: if one person has This week selected and the other This month, the numbers will not match.
Your counting rules are the same ones ABM's own Calls & Actions Dashboard uses for your user in the ABM desktop program, so a change in either place shows up in both. The Home screen reads your rules once, when ABM Service is first loaded, so a change made in the ABM desktop program reaches Home the next time ABM Service is reloaded or opened again.
Can I use the Home screen with the keyboard?
Yes — everything on the Home screen that does something can be reached with the keyboard. Press the Tab key to move forward through the controls and Shift and Tab together (Shift+Tab) to move back; press Enter to use the one that is highlighted. The Space bar also works on buttons, such as the period pills and the grouping switch, but not on the links that open another screen: the four buttons at the top (Customers, Calls, Scheduler, Log a call), Open the Scheduler → and customer names open with Enter only.
- The buttons and pills — Tab reaches Menu, the four buttons at the top, The period before, the four period pills, The period after (only once you have stepped back, because it cannot be used on the current period), Open the Scheduler →, the grouping switch (Type, Customer, Engineer) and Show more when it is there.
- The counting-rules dropdowns — press Enter on Call types, Open, Active or Closed to open the list, Tab through All, None and the entries, and press the Space bar to tick or untick one. Press Escape to close the list.
- Today on the board — Tab to the panel, then use the Up and Down arrow keys (or Page Up and Page Down) to scroll through the engineers. The visit blocks are not separate stops, because they do not open anything.
- Customer names — on the grouping card set to Customer, Tab reaches each customer's name, and the open-in-new button beside it appears as you reach it.
The tiles and totals give every number in words beside its colour, so you can read the Calls by status and Actions by status panels without relying on the colours.
What do the messages on the Home screen mean?
The Home screen shows a short message under the period bar when something could not be loaded or saved. The messages are:
- "These numbers could not be refreshed, so they are the last ones that loaded." — ABM Service could not load the counts for the period you chose. The panels still show the previous numbers, but the highlighted period pill and the line beside the pills may no longer describe them: the pill shows the period you just chose, and the line can say "to the end of today" over numbers from an earlier period, or leave those words out over numbers from the current one. Do not rely on the figures until the message has gone. If it happens as Home first opens, there are no previous numbers, so the panels show zeros, Today on the board says "Nobody is on the board today." and the grouping card says "Nothing in this period." — none of which is a true count. Choose a different period, or go to another screen and come back to Home, to try again. The message goes away once the numbers load.
- "The dashboard could not read your counting rules." — your saved rules could not be loaded, so the counting-rule dropdowns may be empty and the numbers are counted the default way. Go to another screen and come back to Home to try again.
- "Your counting rules were changed here but could not be saved for next time." — the numbers on screen already use your change, but it was not saved, so it will be gone next time and ABM's desktop dashboard will not have it. The message goes away the next time the Home screen loads its numbers, for example when you change the period, even though the change is still not saved.
When Home first opens, Today on the board and the grouping card show Loading… until the numbers arrive.
Does the Home screen update by itself?
No — the Home screen reads its numbers when you open it, and again when you change the period, step back or forward, change Call types, or select Show more on the grouping card set to Customer. It does not update on its own while it stays open, so a call logged or a visit finished since then is not counted until Home reads its numbers again.
There is no Refresh button on the Home screen. To bring it up to date, open the menu, go to another screen and come back to Home, or select a different period pill and then the one you were on. The greeting and the time-now line on Today on the board are also set when Home opens.
Changing the Open, Active or Closed counting rules does not fetch anything new: it re-sorts the numbers already on the Home screen into the tiles straight away.