What is a Service?
In One Big Green, a Service represents a distinct part of the work your company provides at a Service Site. A Service sits under a Service Site and has its own operational settings and field inventory. This structure helps you organize work, assign responsibility, schedule visits, and keep plant displays associated with the work they belong to.
One Service Site can have one Service or several. For example, you might provide interior plant maintenance and exterior planter maintenance at the same office building. These can be configured as separate Services under the same Service Site because they represent different types of work.
The difference between a Service Site and a Service
A Service Site answers: “Where do we work?”
A Service answers: “What work do we do there?”
The Service Site holds location-level information, such as the address, contacts, opening hours, access and parking instructions, and the building’s floor and zone structure. Each Service holds the information needed to organize a particular part of the work, including its service type, assigned people, schedule-related settings, and inventory.
For example, a hotel may have one Service Site with an interior plant-care Service and an exterior maintenance Service. The address and site instructions are shared, but each Service can have its own displays, technician, supervisor, and schedule.
Which Service types are available?
One Big Green supports four pre-defined Service types:
Interior: for indoor plant-care work.
Exterior: for outdoor plant-care work, such as planters or flower beds.
Floral: for floral services.
Holiday: for holiday-related plant or decoration services.
Choose the type that best reflects the work being delivered. This helps keep your portfolio organized and distinguish different kinds of service.
When should you create more than one Service?
Create separate Services when the work at a location needs to be managed separately. Common reasons include:
The work is of a different type, such as interior and exterior plant care.
The work follows a different visit schedule.
Different technicians or supervisors are responsible for it.
The work is covered by a separate contract.
The work needs its own inventory of displays.
For example, if one team maintains the indoor plants every week and another team looks after the exterior planters once a month, separate Services make the responsibilities, schedules, and inventories clearer.
How Service nicknames work
A nickname lets you divide a Service into clearly named parts without creating a completely separate Service type. This can be useful when parts of the work need different technicians, supervisors, or visit schedules, but should remain grouped under the same Service.
For example, an Interior Service might use the nicknames “Living wall” and “Floor plants”. Both are still part of the Interior Service, but the nickname helps your team identify the relevant part of the work and manage its assignment or schedule separately.
If you do not specify a nickname, One Big Green uses “All service site” as the default label. Use clear, consistent nicknames that your office team and field team will recognize.
How to set up and manage a Service
Open Service sites in the Back Office and select the relevant Service Site. In the Service Site Info tab, find the Services section. From there, you can create a Service and maintain its settings. Service settings can be updated later as your operation changes.
When setting up a Service, you can configure details such as:
Service type: interior, exterior, or floral.
Nickname, if you need to distinguish a part of the work.
Status: active or inactive.
Visit frequency and contract type.
Contract start date, contract end date, and installation date, where relevant.
Technician and supervisor responsible for the Service.
We recommend assigning both a technician and a supervisor where possible. Clear responsibility supports smoother day-to-day coordination and more consistent reporting.
Each Service has its own field inventory
Displays, planters, and plants belong to a Service’s field inventory rather than directly to the Service Site as a whole. This is important when a location has more than one Service: the inventory for interior plant care can remain separate from the inventory for exterior planters.
When you create a new Service, its display list will be empty. Add displays manually or use the available import workflows to build the inventory for the work covered by that Service.
Active and inactive Services
Use the active or inactive status to reflect whether the Service is currently being provided. If your customer discontinued the Service, but you expect they may return and resume the work later, consider marking the Service as inactive rather than deleting it. This preserves the record for reference. If the service relationship has ended for good and you no longer need the Service, you may choose to delete it.
Important: Deleting a Service also deletes all the Service inventory, all open extras, and outstanding visit sequences for that Service. This action cannot be reversed. Before deleting a Service, check whether you may need to resume the work later and choose carefully between deactivating it and deleting it permanently.
Practical tips
Think about how your team actually delivers the work before deciding whether to use one Service or several.
Separate Services when they have different contracts, schedules, technicians, supervisors, or inventories.
Use short, recognizable nicknames such as “Living wall” or “Floor plants” when a Service needs to be split into manageable parts.
Assign a technician and a supervisor to each Service where possible.
Keep the Service type, status, dates, and visit frequency up to date so the Back Office reflects current operations.
Remember: Service Sites represent locations; Services represent the work performed at those locations; and each Service has its own field inventory.