Introducing Dispatch Scout Labs: Early Access to What We’re Building Next

Every software team has features it’s excited about months before they’re “officially” ready — built, tested, genuinely useful, but still being shaped. The usual move is to keep them locked away until every pixel settles. We think that’s backwards. Today we’re opening the drawer.

Dispatch Scout Labs is our new early-access program: promising features shipped to every account the moment they’re safe and useful, marked with a ✨ Labs badge while we refine them with your feedback. And the first one out is a favorite around here — the Record Graph, an interactive visual map of everything connected to a customer or job.

What Labs Is

A Labs feature is fully built, fully tested, and safe to use with your real data. What makes it “Labs” is that we’re still refining how it looks and works — and that your feedback directly shapes where it goes. Think of it as a sneak preview: you get useful tools months before they’d otherwise be ready, and we get to learn from real service businesses using them on real work.

Spotting one is easy: Labs features carry a ✨ Labs badge right next to the feature’s name in the app. Hover the badge for a quick explanation. No badge means it’s a standard, fully supported part of Dispatch Scout. There’s nothing to enable and nothing extra to pay — Labs features are on for everyone and included in your plan.

Safe to Use, Free to Change

“Experimental” describes the design, not the safety. Here’s exactly what the badge does and doesn’t mean:

Change is the point. A button might move, a screen might get redesigned, a capability might appear between visits. That’s us acting on feedback — including yours.

Where Labs Features End Up

Every Labs feature is headed one of three places:

1. Graduation — it proves useful, the design settles, and the badge comes off. Most features we ship to Labs are on this path.
2. Evolution — it changes shape based on what we learn. The idea survives; the first draft doesn’t.
3. Retirement — occasionally a feature doesn’t earn its place and is removed. If a Labs feature you rely on is being retired, we’ll tell you ahead of time.

Meet the Record Graph

Here’s the problem the Record Graph solves. A customer calls, and reconstructing their story means clicking through five tabs: jobs here, invoices there, payments somewhere else, notes in a fourth place. You end up holding the picture in your head.

The Record Graph draws that picture for you. Open any customer or job and click the Graph tab: every connected record — jobs, invoices, payments, notes, and more — appears as colored circles connected by arrows pointing from parent to child. Customer → job → invoice → payment. The whole relationship, one screen.

How to Read It

Every record type gets its own color and icon — clients are blue, jobs orange, invoices pink, payments green, notes gold — with a legend above the graph. The record you’re viewing sits at the center with a dark ring around it. Two details do a lot of quiet work:

• Bigger circles mean bigger dollars. Invoice and payment circles grow with their amount, so your largest invoices stand out at a glance.
• A red ring means money is still owed. Any real invoice (not an estimate) with an outstanding balance gets a red ring. A big pink circle with a red ring and no green payment circles attached? That’s an invoice worth chasing — and you just found it without running a report.

The Timeline Replay

Below the graph sits a play button and a slider. Press play and the customer’s history builds itself in order — the first job appears, then its invoice, then the payment, and so on through today. It’s an eight-second replay of the entire relationship, and it’s weirdly compelling: you can watch a one-off repair customer become a loyal account. Drag the slider to scrub to any point in time; the date shows as you move.

Built for Exploring

• Hover any circle for a detail card — type, name, status, amount, date — while connected records light up and everything else fades.
• Click a circle to open that record in a new tab. The graph stays where you left it.
• Double-click a job on the customer graph and its appointments, technicians, notes, and attachments bloom out in place. Start with the big picture, drill into just the jobs you care about.
• Drag, zoom, and pan to rearrange and move around.
• Filter by type — every legend entry is a button. Hide payments to study scheduling; hide appointments to study money.
• Text view — flip the Text nodes switch and circles become record names, like a mind map. Your choice is remembered per browser.

Good to Know

• It never changes data. The graph is a read-only view — exploring, filtering, and expanding never edits a record.
• It respects your permissions. The customer graph is visible only to users who can view customer pages; the job graph follows the job page’s access.
• Very long histories are trimmed to the 300 most recent records, with a notice when older ones are left out. The record pages themselves always show everything.

Your Feedback Steers It

This is the part of Labs we care about most. Rough edges are more likely in a Labs feature than elsewhere — that’s honest — and reporting them genuinely changes what we build next. Tell support or your account manager, and mention the feature by name. “The Record Graph would be perfect if it also showed X” is exactly the kind of sentence Labs exists to collect.

Try It Today

The Record Graph is live now on every Dispatch Scout account:

1. Open any customer or job
2. Click the Graph tab (look for the ✨ Labs badge)
3. Press play on the timeline and watch the history build

And keep an eye out for the ✨ badge elsewhere — the Labs list grows as we ship new experiments.

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Dispatch Scout is field service management software built for growing service businesses. From scheduling and dispatch to invoicing, call tracking, and now Labs early-access features like the Record Graph — it’s everything your operation needs in one platform.