Field service management training: what changed in August 2026 for Simpro, AroFlo and BigChange teams

The short version

• Every resource below belongs to one product. Read the section for the product you're already running and skip the other two.
• The table maps a problem you recognise to one named resource, so nobody's reading a changelog to find a fix.
• Six releases landed in August across Simpro Premium, Simpro Mobile and BigChange.
• Assigning a course changes nothing on its own. It's the 30-day sequence at the end that turns an assignment into a habit.
• Run the sequence once per product, then repeat it next quarter with whatever's shipped by then.

August 2026 learning update

August produced three kinds of material across the group: new eLearning courses, refreshed help articles and product release notes. Each one answers a different question.

Courses teach a workflow from end to end, help articles answer a single task, and release notes record what moved underneath both. Start from the problem you recognise rather than from a product menu.

Two points about that table deserve saying out loud. The left column starts from symptoms rather than features, which is how the problem arrives. Somebody says the invoices went out late again, and nobody says the description template needs work.

The right column names a type, because a course and a help article ask for different amounts of time. A help article fits in the ten minutes before a meeting. A course needs a booked slot.

The table also rewards a second read later in the month. Problems that felt urgent in week one trace back to one gap, and two or three rows point at the same place.

Take an office that re-keys field notes and an office that chases subcontractor acceptance. Both are paying for information that arrives in the wrong shape at the wrong moment. Fix the capture point and you've fixed both symptoms. That's why the audit step in the rollout plan comes before any assignment.

Start here: Simpro, AroFlo or BigChange

Each product keeps its own help centre, its own course catalogue and its own release notes. Nothing below crosses between them, because the workflows differ and so does the wording. Find your product in this section, open the route named for it, then read the rest of this article with that one destination in mind.

Simpro. Release notes and how-to articles both live in the Simpro help guide. The August material covers reporting, contracts, access control and subcontractor acceptance, plus two mobile releases. The help guide indexes by article title rather than by version, so search the task name instead of browsing the release list.

AroFlo. Courses sit in the AroFlo learning catalogue behind a sign-in. Help articles stay open at the AroFlo help centre, including the JustAsk quick start for field staff who currently phone the office. Search the course name and the code from the table above once you reach the catalogue, because the codes stay stable while the titles occasionally change.

BigChange. Help articles, the video library and the 2026 release notes all sit in the BigChange support centre. The video library is the newest addition of the three. It covers the same ground as the written guides, which makes it a straight substitute for anyone who prefers watching to reading.

Start with one organising decision. Give a named owner responsibility for the help centre of the product you run. That person checks the release notes monthly, forwards the two or three entries that matter, and keeps everybody else out of the changelog entirely. Teams that don't have an owner tend to meet changes through a support ticket instead.

Keep the role light. Without an owner, release notes reach the business through whoever happened to read them first. With an owner, the monthly summary reaches everyone in the same words, and the two entries that matter arrive attached to the workflow they're changing.

Rotate the role each year if the owner tires of it. Keep it with a single owner rather than a committee. Shared ownership here tends to become nobody's.

Get new starters productive faster

A new starter costs senior time until they stop asking, and most of that time goes on questions the material already answers. The fastest route out is one course teaching the full job lifecycle, followed by a single help article for the first task they hit on their own.

Give them both on day one, then leave them alone for a fortnight. Shadowing is for the genuine exceptions, and it isn't a substitute for either.

For AroFlo teams, start an office starter on Create a Task (AF052) and a field starter on Managing Task Records from the Field. Both teach the same lifecycle from opposite ends. That matters when the two roles don't agree about who captures what. Follow either with Creating Description Templates (AF001), because repetitive typing is where new starters lose the most time in their first month. The course catalogue sits behind a sign-in at the AroFlo support centre.

For Simpro teams, the Jobs with Outstanding Activity Report does more onboarding work than any single course. It shows a new coordinator exactly which jobs have stalled and why. It's your own backlog rather than a worked example, so the shape of your workflow becomes obvious in an afternoon.

For BigChange teams, the Help Guide Video Library suits anyone who learns by watching. Pair one video with the matching written guide. The written version stays searchable afterwards, which matters three weeks later when the starter half-remembers the step.

How much training a starter needs varies by product and by person. Joe H., a junior project manager in construction, put it this way in a 2026 Capterra review of Simpro: "The user interface is very intuitive, making it easy to onboard new team members without extensive training." Treat that as the target for your own onboarding. Then use the courses above for the workflows that don't generalise, the ones specific to your business.

Here is the same material as a first-week shortlist, with what each resource does and what the starter gets from it.

• Create a Task (AF052), AroFlo. A course covering the full task lifecycle. It teaches capture, update and close in one sitting, so an office starter logs work correctly from day one instead of learning the gaps through corrections.
• Managing Task Records from the Field, AroFlo. The same lifecycle taught from the technician's side. It shows what the field owes the office and when, so handover arguments stop before they start.
• Creating Description Templates (AF001), AroFlo. A short course on reusable job wording. It removes the retyping that fills a new starter's first month, so the time goes into the work rather than the keyboard.
• Jobs with Outstanding Activity Report, Simpro. A live report of stalled jobs and their reasons. It exposes your real backlog rather than a worked example, so a new coordinator learns the shape of your workflow in an afternoon.
• Help Guide Video Library, BigChange. The written guides rebuilt as short videos. It suits anyone who learns by watching, so a starter who stalls on written steps still reaches the same answer.

A note on sequencing that applies to all three products. Resist the temptation to assign four resources at once. Two lands as a reasonable ask and gets done. Four reads as a wish list and gets postponed, and that postponement teaches the starter that training isn't serious.

Record keeping deserves its own line. New starters in the trades carry competence and training records that'll outlast their time with you. The Health and Safety Executive sets out what an employer keeps and for how long in its guidance on health and safety training. Record course completions against the person rather than against the job, so the record travels with them. AroFlo teams keeping those records inside the product have a course for it, Managing Compliance Records, in the same catalogue as the rest of the August set.

Readers working in a single trade find the trade-specific context on the Simpro industries pages.

Cut field-to-office admin

Rework doesn't happen in the field, it happens at the handover. Somebody in the field captures a detail once, then the office captures it again in a different shape. Every August release that matters to an operations manager attacks one of those handover points. Find the handover that costs you most, then take the resource that removes it.

The clearest example sits in the two Simpro Mobile releases. Simpro Mobile 17.5 and Simpro Mobile 17.6 both change what a technician captures before leaving site. The more a job card carries when it arrives, the less the office is reconstructing from memory. Two releases inside one month also changed the field app twice, so confirm the crews updated before judging the result.

Subcontractor coordination creates a second handover. The Simpro guide to contractor work order acceptance removes the phone call that confirms whether a subcontractor picked the work up. That call rarely appears on anyone's workload. It happens in the gaps between other tasks, which is exactly why it doesn't get measured.

Contract-heavy operators get a similar effect from how to manage contracts. Recurring work that generates itself from a contract stays off the manual scheduling list entirely. For a maintenance business, that single change removes more monthly admin than any other item in the August set.

Scheduling absorbs a large share of office time. Simpro documents the setup in how to use AI Scheduler, which takes the daily rebuild of tomorrow's board off the coordinator. Treat the first fortnight as a parallel run. Compare the generated board against the one a coordinator builds by hand, and don't switch until they agree.

Access control deserves separate attention. Narrow what each customer sees in the portal using record-level access control for customers. Narrowing that view isn't only an operational tidy-up. It's a data protection measure.

The Information Commissioner's Office treats access control as a core part of security under UK GDPR in its guide to data security. Review the setting whenever a customer portal opens to a new account.

BigChange teams remove the same chasing cost through Two-Way Messaging. Keep the update thread attached to the job rather than to somebody's phone. It'll survive staff turnover, which a WhatsApp thread won't.

The four handovers in short, with the change each one produces and what the office gets back.

• Simpro Mobile 17.5 and 17.6. A pair of releases changing what a technician captures on site. A fuller job card arrives at the office, so the coordinator stops reconstructing detail from memory or a phone call.
• Contractor work order acceptance, Simpro. Visible confirmation that a subcontractor took the work. It replaces the chasing call that rarely appears on anyone's workload, so the office reclaims time nobody currently measures.
• How to manage contracts, Simpro. Recurring work generated from the contract itself. It keeps maintenance visits off the manual scheduling list, so a maintenance-heavy business sheds a recurring block of monthly admin.
• Record-level access control for customers, Simpro. Per-customer control of which records a portal shows. It narrows exposure to what each account needs, so a portal opening to a new customer stops being a data protection question.

What changed in the August releases

Six releases landed in August. Version numbers don't tell you anything on their own, so read each one as the operational change it produces. Four Simpro Premium releases, two Simpro Mobile releases and two BigChange releases all shipped inside the month. Skim each source note for the workflow you own rather than for the feature list.

Simpro Premium 26.3.6 through 26.3.9. Four releases across one month. Read them as a set rather than individually, because the reporting and contract changes build on each other. Begin at Simpro Premium 26.3.9 and work backwards until the notes stop mentioning anything you recognise.

Simpro Mobile 17.5 and 17.6. Two releases inside one month, so the field app changed twice. Anyone managing technicians benefits from reading both notes together. Check the app version on two or three devices afterwards, because a release nobody installed produces confused reports rather than improvements.

BigChange 26.08.02 and 26.08.03. Both entries sit in the BigChange 2026 release notes. The August entries cover messaging and job workflow, which pairs directly with Two-Way Messaging named earlier.

AroFlo help articles. No AroFlo release note appeared in the August learning set. The refreshed material arrived as help articles instead, covering AroPoint reports, clock in and clock out and supplier online catalogues. Treat those three as the AroFlo equivalent of a release note for the month.

Those three AroFlo articles carry real operational weight for such a short format.

• AroPoint reports. Vehicle and asset movement reported against jobs. Managers see where time went between sites, so route and allowance disputes resolve against a record rather than a recollection.
• Clock in and clock out. Start and finish captured at the point of work. Timesheet hours match job hours without a weekly reconciliation, so payroll queries drop to the genuine exceptions.
• Supplier online catalogues. Live supplier pricing pulled into quoting. Estimators quote from current rates rather than a stale spreadsheet, so margin erosion between quote and invoice narrows.

None of those three demands a project. Each one takes an afternoon to configure and a fortnight to bed in, which makes them reasonable candidates for week three of the rollout sequence below.

A closing point about release notes. Reading four version notes end to end takes about twenty minutes and repays that once, on the day a technician reports something odd that turns out to have changed deliberately. Without the reading, the same report becomes a support ticket and a fortnight of uncertainty.

Keep a short written record of what you read and what you acted on. A single line per month works: the version, the one change that affected your team, and what you did about it. After a year you have a log of when each setting last moved and who moved it. It also shortens the next handover, because a replacement coordinator inherits the reasoning rather than only the configuration.

Roll it out: a 30-day plan for your team

Assigning a course changes nothing by itself. Adoption needs a sequence, a named owner and a date against it. This four-week plan moves one product from assigned to genuinely used, and it fits around live work rather than replacing it. Run the sequence once per product, then repeat it next quarter.

Week one: audit. List the five tasks your team performs most. Next to each, write the person who does it and the way they were taught. Most teams find at least two tasks that nobody taught formally, where the current method came from watching somebody who left. Those two become the targets. Nothing else happens in week one, and resisting the urge to fix anything early is the point of the week.

Week two: assign. Pick two resources from the table above that match the two gaps you found. Assign one per person, with a completion date inside the week. Two per person is the ceiling. A longer list reads as optional and gets treated that way. Put the date in the same place you put job deadlines, because a training date kept somewhere separate carries less weight.

Week three: switch one thing on. Pick a single capability from the August material and turn it on for one team. Reporting changes work well here, since the output appears straight away without anyone changing how they work. Name the number the team's now watching and the person who owns it. One capability, one team, one owner.

Week four: check adoption. Open the report you enabled in week three and compare it against the same week in the previous month. Ask the two people who completed resources what they now do differently. Write their answer down in their words, not yours. That sentence lands with the next person in a way the course description does not, and it gives you the opening line for next quarter's round.

What finishing looks like: two people trained against a named gap, one capability live with an owner, and one sentence describing what changed. Reaching that point makes the next round self-sustaining, because the team has evidence rather than an instruction. Skip week four and you're repeating the assignment next quarter, and the second round rarely lands as well.

Teams that finish the sequence and want the wider product context move on to Simpro field service management software.

Your next action this week

Find the row in the table above that matches a problem you recognised while reading. That's your starting point. Assign that one resource to the person who owns the task, with a date against it. Return for the 30-day sequence once that first assignment lands, and treat the rest of the August set as next month's work.

One row, one owner, one date. The material stays available, and a single completed assignment beats a list nobody starts.