Scheduling
Plan the week ahead. Handle the PM wave. Let customers book their own slot.
Scheduling is a different job from dispatch. You're not moving today's jobs around — you're laying down next Tuesday's work order for Mrs. Jenkins's furnace tune and letting your Google-search customer pick a Thursday morning that fits.
Where scheduling ends and dispatch begins
A dispatcher's job is to move today's jobs around when the day changes. A scheduler's job is to make sure next Tuesday has the right jobs on the right techs at the right times before it starts. Same calendar surface, different mode.
TradeVan's calendar handles both. Week view for planning ahead, day view for tracking today, dispatch grid for shifting jobs live. Each tech has working hours, days off, and on-call rotation set once in Settings; the calendar respects them without the scheduler having to remember who's on vacation the second week of August.
Week view
Every tech, every day, every slot the customer picked
Working hours, days off, on-call rotation, closed shop days — the calendar reads all of it. Drop a job into a slot that violates any of those and TradeVan warns you before you commit.
How dispatch handles today →The PM wave is scheduled without you sitting there
March comes. Every customer with a semi-annual PM contract needs a spring AC tune-up. 200 visits across 6 weeks across 4 techs. On a whiteboard this is the worst two evenings of your year.
In TradeVan the PM plan template generates the visits automatically at the right time of year. They land on the calendar unassigned so you can assign them onto techs and days in one pass — drag, drop, done. You still nudge individual visits around if a customer prefers Tuesday afternoons, but you're not hand-creating 200 rows.
Customer self-book
Customers can pick their own slot on your public page
Opt-in. Your /shop/<slug> page offers a self-book flow; the customer sees the slots you've actually got open, picks one, and the booking lands in your Requests inbox for a one-tap conversion to a scheduled work order.
On the truck
Once scheduled, the tech's phone shows it
Every scheduled job appears on the tech's day view sorted by scheduled time. Tap in — customer, address, checklist for the job type. Everything works offline; every status button records instantly.
Frequently asked questions
- How is scheduling different from dispatch in TradeVan?
- Scheduling is what's on which day next Tuesday. Dispatch is who's running which job right now. TradeVan handles both on the same calendar surface — you plan the week in scheduling mode, and switch to dispatch mode when the day starts and jobs need to move around live.
- Can I set per-tech availability?
- Yes. Each tech has working hours, days off, and an on-call rotation you set once in Settings. The calendar reads it. Drop a job into a slot when a tech is off and TradeVan warns you before you commit; you can override, we just make sure you saw it.
- How does the semi-annual PM wave get scheduled?
- Maintenance plan templates auto-generate the visits at the right time of year. Spring AC tunes populate the calendar in March–April; fall furnace tunes populate in September–October. The visits land on the calendar unassigned so the office can slot them onto techs in one pass — you don't sit at 6 PM in March hand-creating 200 tunes from scratch.
- Can customers book their own appointment slots?
- Yes. Your public /shop/<slug> page can offer a self-book flow (opt-in). The customer picks from your available slots; the booking lands in your Requests inbox for a one-tap conversion to a scheduled work order. Slot availability respects the same tech-availability rules the office uses.
- Does it flag scheduling conflicts?
- Overlapping appointments, tech's day off, closed shop days, after-hours scheduling — all flag as warnings before you save. Warnings, not blocks. Dispatchers sometimes need to override; we just make sure the human decision is a deliberate one.
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