Dispatch and the calendar
The calendar is the plan. Dispatch is the day as it’s actually going.
The calendar
Jobs → Calendar shows scheduled work by day, week or month. Drag a job to move it. Assign a crew from the job itself, or from the crew schedule.
Use it for planning the week: spotting the day with eleven stops and the day with two, and evening them out before Monday.
Calendar sync (pushing this to Google or Outlook) is Growth and up
(calendarSync).
Planning the day across crews
On the calendar’s day view, Optimize Routes opens the day’s plan with two tabs:
- Each crew’s route puts each crew’s own stops in the shortest order. Nobody changes crew.
- Balance across crews spreads the day over the crews leading its jobs first, then orders each crew’s stops. Stops go to the crew they’re closest to, and a crew with a light day picks up work from one with a long day. Each crew shows its stops with the time it gets to each one, and how long its day was before and after.
Click Apply plan to move the jobs and set the order exactly as shown. Each crew that gains or loses a job gets the same notice a drag on the calendar sends.
A few rules the plan always follows:
- Arrival windows. A job with an arrival window is reached inside it whenever any order allows. A stop that still can’t make it is marked Late.
- Shifts. Each crew plans from its shift start. Work past the shift’s end only happens when the day can’t fit otherwise.
- Pinned jobs. A job already in progress, or one staffed by more than one person, stays with its crew.
- No map location. A job whose property hasn’t been placed on the map stays where it is, and the plan lists it.
Set where each truck leaves from and each crew’s shift with Start and shift on the crew in the plan. Without a starting address, a crew starts at its first stop; without a shift, it plans 8:00 to 5:00.
Dispatch
Dispatch is the live view: a map of today’s work and where crews are against it. It answers the question a customer asks on the phone - “is someone coming today?” - without you calling the crew to find out.
Dispatch requires Professional and up (gpsTracking) - the whole page,
not just the live positions. Without it the page shows an upgrade prompt.
Trails need Business (advancedDispatch). A trail shows each crew
member’s newest 200 location points - under an hour of driving with the
app open - not their whole day.
Rescheduling when weather turns
Storm days are the real test. Move the affected jobs on the calendar; the crews see the change in the mobile app as soon as they have signal.
If you’re rescheduling a whole day, do it in the calendar rather than job by job - dragging a day’s work to another day keeps the ordering.
Tips
- Assign crews, not just dates. An unassigned job on the calendar is a plan nobody has been told about.
- Look at tomorrow before you leave today. Most dispatch problems are visible the afternoon before.