Simple Mode: fast data entry for field operators

The full VanaGreen app has menus for collections, treatments, outgoing shipments, stock, market prices, reports — useful for an administrator or a senior operator, but overkill for someone recently hired, whose day consists almost entirely of the same repeated operation: someone shows up with a batch of waste, it gets weighed, the document gets issued. The full menu, in that case, isn't a tool — it's a source of errors and questions.

VanaGreen now adds a "Simple Mode" — a wizard built specifically for this type of user.

What the operator sees, step by step

Simple Mode isn't a new app — it's the existing building blocks composed into a guided flow, with no side menu and no free navigation: start screen → pick a favorite (reason + preferred source, if the user doesn't already have a default set) → search for or quickly add the source (individual or company) → add waste items, repeatable → finish, with the document downloading automatically at the end. Every step uses exactly the same components as the full collection flow — there's no parallel or simplified version of the underlying logic, just a narrower interface on top of it.

A user can have a default favorite set (typical reason + source), in which case the wizard skips straight to the source-search step — for a collection point where 90% of entries follow the same pattern, that cuts the flow down to a few taps.

A real account, just a narrower interface

Important: Simple Mode is strictly a UI simplification. The user remains a regular operator, with all the same permissions underneath, unchanged — it's not a new role with limited data access. It's turned on per user, from Settings → Users, where the admin checks a box for Simple Mode and, optionally, sets a default favorite for that account. Someone who occasionally needs functions from the full app can always get a separate account, or switch back to full mode if their role changes.

What live testing surfaced

The feature was verified directly by Stefan on the real flow, not just in automated tests, and that testing caught two problems the initial implementation didn't cover:

• The wizard would get stuck indefinitely on the "downloading document" screen — the logic waiting for the final document was giving up too early, even when the PDF generation on the server hadn't finished yet. Fixed so the wizard keeps polling the document status for as long as needed, not just for as long as the previous step took.
• The unit price never got filled in for entries made through Simple Mode, which left the generated Borderou without prices — invisible in the wizard itself (weight and item count are the only data the operator sees), but the price still had to be resolved and saved correctly in the background, and initially it wasn't.

Both were caught and fixed before Simple Mode went into regular use — exactly the point of running live verification passes.

Why it matters for an operator

For anyone who hires field operators frequently, Simple Mode dramatically shortens onboarding time — a new hire can be productive from day one on the repetitive flow, with no extensive training on an app with dozens of sections they'll never touch. And just as important, the risk of a new hire accidentally landing in the wrong part of the app disappears entirely — there's simply nowhere to wander off to.