Automated Utility Locate Tickets

Before any crew digs, someone has to file a locate ticket so utility lines get marked. The office manager pulled each upcoming appointment from ServiceMinder, filed a ticket in the Texas811 portal, and pasted the ticket number back into the appointment. That happened ten to fifteen times a week.

Picking the right property matters. File on the wrong parcel and the locators mark a neighbor’s yard. The owner wanted tickets to happen automatically once a job was booked.

The build uses a rolling window of upcoming jobs, checked twice a day, so locate-ticket preparation can happen ahead of the scheduled work.

Before building, we worked through both systems, ServiceMinder and the Texas811 portal, without changing a single record. Then we set the rule that matters most: file only when the house number and street match exactly one property. Everything else goes to a person, with a plain-language reason.

With the owner’s sign-off, the agent filed real tickets from its first day while the office kept filing in parallel. That meant accepting the risk of an occasional duplicate, so no job depended on the agent alone.

A job goes to the office when there’s no house number, when the address can’t be located, when more than one property could match, or when the property looks wrong. New-build lots that Texas811 doesn’t know yet get a draft instead. The agent traces the county’s recorded lot, checks its size against county records, and leaves the draft for a person to submit. It never submits those itself.

1. 01Twice a day, the agent reads upcoming ServiceMinder appointments for the services that require digging.
2. 02It skips jobs already covered by a recent ticket.
3. 03It locates the address, finds a real cross street, and fills in the Texas811 ticket, marking the entire property.
4. 04It selects a property only when the house number and street match exactly one candidate. A second map check rejects properties in the wrong town.
5. 05It submits the ticket and writes the ticket number back to the appointment in ServiceMinder.
6. 06Each morning, the office gets one run log: tickets filed with their dig dates, and a numbered list of anything that needs a person.

From September 4 to 17, 2026, the agent filed 25 real locate tickets and wrote every ticket number back to its appointment. Twelve of those came from its own unattended schedule, which started September 14. Jobs that didn’t match exactly one property went to the office with the reason attached, and new-build lots arrived as ready-to-review drafts.

As of September 18, the office was still filing in parallel, as the owner decided before launch. The measure that matters is simple: every dig covered by a valid ticket, with less office time spent filing them.