Dispatch board basics

Service days die by phone tree — four techs, nine stops, and a coordinator narrating everyone's morning. The dispatch board replaces the narration: calls on dates, techs on calls, and an unscheduled lane that shows exactly what still needs a decision. Run it once in the morning and once when the phone rings; that's the whole discipline.

Where calls come from

• Agreement visits — a service agreement's cadence surfaces its visits as calls on schedule, no one remembering anything.
• One-off calls — the phone rings, you log the call against the customer and site (Service → Calls). Warranty callbacks live in their own lane of the business but reach the same crews.

Run the board

1. Service → Dispatch (/service/dispatch). The board reads by day; the unscheduled lane holds calls with no date yet — that lane is your to-do list, not a parking lot.
2. Date first, techs second. A call needs a target date before techs can go on it — pull it onto the day, then assign from the available workers. Each call shows its crew; "none assigned" is the board telling you someone's morning is still unplanned.
3. Reschedule by moving the date. Customer pushes to Thursday? Change the call's date — assignments and the agreement's visit tracking follow the call.
4. Techs see their own day under My Calls — the field-facing view of what you just dispatched, which is what makes the board the single conversation.

Completed calls close with the work recorded and the signer captured — on an agreement visit that also stamps the agreement's last-visit date, and anything the tech found that needs a comeback lands in Follow-ups for pricing rather than in memory.

Common mistakes

• Dispatching by text thread. The board only kills the phone tree if it's the single source. A call scheduled in a text exists nowhere — no visit history, no invoice trail.
• Letting the unscheduled lane silt up. Ten undated calls is ten promises with no plan. Triage the lane daily; date-or-decline is the move.
• Skipping the completion record. The signed, closed call is your proof of service — on maintenance contracts it's also what the renewal conversation stands on.

See also

• Service agreements — cadence, visits, invoicing
• Enter and approve timecards