By Noa Benitez, founder of BenIT, an AI consultancy in Toulouse.
Praxedo fills in the structure of your after-sales service report on its own: date, location, client name, time spent. What's still written by hand is the diagnosis, the fix applied, and the next steps. That's the part that eats into your evenings.
What writing up your reports actually costs you
Number of jobs per week × time spent writing each report × 45 weeks
15 jobs × 12 minutes × 45 weeks = 135 hours a year
Run the calculation with your own numbers.
A hundred and thirty-five hours. That's what writing service reports costs a maintenance company running fifteen jobs a week. Not counting weekends. According to a study by FEDA's Observatory of Administrative Burden, maintenance technicians spend an average of 23% of their weekly working time on administrative tasks, with report writing making up the largest share.
What goes into an after-sales service report, and why it's costly
An after-sales service report brings together everything a client and a manager need to know after a technician's visit. The date, the address, the client's name, the equipment involved, the symptom described, the diagnosis made, the parts replaced, the time spent, the signature.
Praxedo knows the administrative part. The technical part is on you.
Every word counts. A poorly written report means a client disputing an invoice, a technician who can't recall what they did three months earlier, or a colleague picking up the file without understanding what was done. It also means a dispute that drags on, because the written record doesn't prove anything precise.
The real cost isn't the time spent writing. It's writing it in the evening, when tomorrow's schedule is already waiting, so are the invoices, and your head isn't quite in it anymore. Getting back 10 hours a week on repetitive tasks often starts with this one.
What Praxedo actually automates on the service report
Praxedo does three things well on the service report. First, it structures the technician's mobile form: required fields, dropdown lists, checkboxes. The technician no longer leaves with an illegible sheet. That's the first real gain, and it's not a small one.
Next, it timestamps and geolocates the job. Arrival time, departure time, time spent: all captured without re-entering anything. Geolocation also helps in case of a dispute over where the job actually took place.
How many hours disappear into these reports each week
Thirty minutes to run the numbers on your actual figures, no strings attached.
Book the free auditFinally, it generates a pre-filled PDF with the job details and sends it to the client. The administrative part of the report is covered. The client gets a clean, legible document with your branding.
What Praxedo fills in on its own, and what's still manual
| Report element | Praxedo fills it in | Still needs to be written |
|---|---|---|
| Date, time, location | Yes | No |
| Client name and equipment | Yes | No |
| Time spent on the job | Yes | No |
| Client signature | Yes | No |
| Symptom described by the client | Partially | Yes |
| Technical diagnosis | No | Yes |
| Fix applied | No | Yes |
| Parts replaced and reference numbers | Partially | Yes |
| Next steps or follow-up visit | No | Yes |
Praxedo's own website details these features on its page dedicated to the service report. The tool builds the frame. The substance stays human.
What Praxedo doesn't do yet: the part that still gets written at night
The technician gets home. They open Praxedo. They see the pre-filled fields: the address, the time spent, the signature. Then they reach the free-text field. There, they have to describe what they found, what they did, why they did it, and what needs checking at the next visit.
Nobody dictates that free-text field in full. Praxedo doesn't read the equipment's technical spec sheet. It doesn't know the history of jobs done on that piece of equipment. It doesn't know that this model has a recurring fault on its circuit board. It doesn't cross-reference the data with spare parts stock.
The technician is the one who knows. And they're the one typing. Or dictating into their phone, in the evening, in the van, hoping the voice-recognition software understands the part's name. According to a survey by AFIM, 68% of maintenance managers believe report quality undermines the traceability of jobs over time.
How to close the gap without switching software or retraining your technicians
An AI collaborator reads what the technician dictates, whether from Praxedo or from their phone. It knows the history of jobs done on that piece of equipment. It knows the vocabulary of your trade. It writes up the diagnosis, the fix, and the next steps, in the format you already use.
What this represents on your payroll
Your numbers, your schedule, your real cost. Thirty minutes to get a clear picture.
Message us on WhatsAppNo migration. No new tool. The technician still opens Praxedo in the morning. They still sign on their phone in the evening. What changes is the free-text field: it arrives already filled in. The technician reviews it, corrects it if needed, and approves it.
The method doesn't require any special training. It's installed on top of what's already there and adapts to your processes, not the other way around. Automation for construction and field jobs follows the same logic: start from what already works to remove what doesn't.
Custom-built AI collaborator solutions plug directly into your current tools. Praxedo stays. The time spent writing disappears. The method in four steps starts with an audit of your existing operation, not a theoretical recommendation.
What a pre-filled service report actually looks like for a client
A multi-trade maintenance company based in Toulouse, working on laboratory equipment. Fifteen technicians. Forty jobs a day. Each technician spent between ten and fifteen minutes writing up their report in the evening.
The result isn't an abstract productivity gain. It's a technician who no longer works in the evening. It's a more complete report, because it's dictated on the spot, not reconstructed three hours later. It's also a reliable record for the manager, who can check what was done without calling the technician.
Known limits: when Praxedo isn't enough, even with an add-on
Praxedo isn't enough when the technician can't dictate. In a dead zone, with no signal, the voice memo doesn't upload. Some sites ban phones. Some jobs require both hands at all times. In those cases, manual entry remains the only option.
An AI collaborator isn't enough either when the technician refuses to speak out loud. Because they're at a client's site, because they're not used to it, because they find it awkward. Buy-in from the field isn't automatic. It's built over time, not through a single demo.
What your Praxedo setup doesn't cover
We'll look together, at your actual reports, at what can disappear. Thirty minutes, no more.
Block off thirty minutesFinally, no add-on will make up for a report that requires a precise measurement without manual entry. If the report needs to include a numerical value read off a device, someone will have to type it in. Or connect the device. That's a different budget. Subscription tiers and setup fees depend on the complexity of the operation, not the number of screens.
Checking in five minutes what your Praxedo setup already covers
Pull up your last month of jobs. Open three reports at random. Count the lines Praxedo filled in on its own. Count the ones you wrote by hand. If the handwritten part is more than a third of the report, you're losing time.
Then check whether your report templates include dropdown lists for common symptoms. If not, you're writing the same thing twice. If they do, but technicians aren't filling them in, the problem isn't the software. It's a matter of instructions or habit, and no tool will fix that for you.
The blank-report test
Open Praxedo, create a fake job, generate the PDF without writing anything. Everything that shows up is automated. Everything that's missing is your real workload.
Automation for a small construction business: where to start effectively? walks through the same approach for other tasks beyond the service report.