PlumbingBossPro Blog — Dispatch & Scheduling

The Plumbing Dispatch Board: Every Van, Every Day and Every Call on One Screen

Every plumbing office has some version of a dispatch board. For some it is a whiteboard with magnets. For others it is a paper calendar, a shared spreadsheet, or the owner's memory. The board is where the day gets decided, and if it is wrong, the whole day is wrong.

Why the Board Comes First

The big picture of plumbing dispatch is laid out in Plumbing Dispatch Software: The Complete Guide to Scheduling Service Calls and Running Your Vans. This article zooms in on the one screen that everything else depends on.

In PlumbingBossPro the dispatch board is the Scheduled List. It shows jobs by day, and each job carries a van. That is the whole structure: day, van, order. Simple on purpose, because the person reading it is usually also answering the phone.

What You See on the Board

Pick a day and the board shows every job scheduled on it. Each row tells you enough to make a decision without opening the job:

• The address and the customer. Who and where.
• The work. Service call, drain cleaning, water heater replacement, yearly flush, whatever you booked it as from your service list.
• The van. Which tech is taking it.
• The order. Where it sits in that van's route.
• The status. Whether the tech has started, completed or skipped it.

Behind each job is the property, with its equipment list and access notes. When the tech opens the job on their phone, they see the water heater, its size and fuel, where it is, and notes like where the main shut-off is. The board does not need to show all of that, but dispatch benefits from knowing it is there.

Reading the Board Before You Promise a Time

The most useful habit a plumbing dispatcher can build is checking the board before telling a customer when someone will come. “We can be there Thursday” is easy to say and hard to take back.

Filter to the van that does that kind of work and look at the day:

• How many stops are already on it? A day of short repairs can usually take one more.
• Is there a long job? A water heater swap or a repipe eats most of a day. Stacking short calls around it is risky.
• Where are the other stops? A call across town from everything else on the day costs drive time.
• Is there slack for emergencies? The repair van especially needs room for the call that has not come in yet.

If the day looks tight, offer the next day with room. A customer who is told Friday and gets Friday is happier than one told Thursday who gets a call at 4pm saying it slipped.

Filtering, Routing and Saved Views

The board gets more useful with three tools. Filtering by van narrows it to one tech's day. Auto-route puts a van's stops in order, Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, and you can then set the order by hand. Saved views keep the filters you use every day one click away.

Each of these has its own guide. For the van filter, read Filtering the Plumbing Dispatch Board by Van. For routing, read Auto-Routing Plumbing Calls: Closest First or Furthest First From the Shop.

The Board and the Tech's Phone

The board is only worth keeping current if the techs see the same thing. In PlumbingBossPro they do. Each tech logs in to the tech app with the company login and a personal PIN, and sees their own calls for the day in route order. When dispatch moves a job up, adds an emergency, or pushes a call to tomorrow, the tech's list follows.

That is the real difference from a whiteboard. A whiteboard change only reaches the tech if somebody calls them. A board change reaches the phone on its own, and the tech can tap the navigation button on the new stop and go.

Status flows the other way. When a tech taps Start, Skip or Complete, the board shows it. Dispatch can see at a glance which van is on its last call and which one is running behind, without phoning anyone.

Keeping the Board Honest

A board is only as good as the habits around it. A few rules that help:

• Every job goes on the board. No “I'll just swing by on my way home” jobs that only live in a tech's head.
• Every job has a van. An unassigned job is one nobody is going to.
• Skips get rebooked the same day. A skip left alone becomes a customer who was forgotten.
• Past days get cleaned up. At the end of the day, nothing should be sitting unfinished on yesterday.

One Screen for the Whole Day

The dispatch board is not the flashy part of plumbing software. It is the part you look at forty times a day. When it shows every van, every call and every status in one place, the office stops guessing and the phones get quieter. To see how the board fits with routing, crew GPS and customer texts, visit the PlumbingBossPro plumbing dispatch software page.