PlumbingBossPro Blog — Dispatch & Scheduling

Dispatching From the Truck: The Owner-Operator Plumber's Schedule

For a lot of plumbers, the dispatcher, the tech, the estimator and the bookkeeper are the same person, and that person is under a sink right now. The phone rings with a muffled hand on it, a customer gets told “I'll call you back,” and the schedule lives in a notebook on the passenger seat. It works until it does not.

The Smallest Office of All

A small office with one person on the phones, covered in Plumbing Dispatch With a Small Office: One Person on the Phones and the Board, has it hard. An owner-operator has no office at all. Everything has to work from the truck, between jobs, in a few minutes at a time.

One Phone, Both Sides

In PlumbingBossPro, the office side and the tech app both run in the browser on a phone, iPhone or Android, with no app store download. An owner-operator can book a job on the office side in the driveway and work it from the tech app ten minutes later.

On the tech side, the day is in route order, each stop has a navigation button, and the job card shows the equipment and access notes from the house. Start, Skip and Complete track the day. Complete creates the invoice and can charge the card on file.

Booking Between Jobs

The owner-operator's biggest scheduling problem is booking calls while working. A few habits help:

• Let calls go to voicemail during a job and return them in batches between stops, unless it sounds like an emergency.
• Point customers to the website request form or the customer app to request service. Requests land in Form Responses, ready to review when you have a minute.
• Text instead of calling back when possible. Two-way texting is quicker than a phone call from a driveway.
• Book the day, not the minute. Offer a morning or afternoon and let the automatic texts handle the exact timing.

Routing Yourself

Auto-route works the same for one van as for five. At the start of the day, or the night before, auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, which for many owner-operators is home. Then set the order by hand for customers who need early or late visits and long jobs that should go first.

When something changes during the day, move the stop on the board and the tech app follows. You are both the dispatcher and the tech, so there is no one to call.

Let the Texts Do Your Call-Ahead

Calling every customer from the truck to say you are on the way costs time and is unsafe while driving. Automatic alerts handle it. Customers choose a night-before reminder, a text when they're next, and a text when you arrive. The on-the-way and arrived texts go out as you work the route. The customer app shows their place in line on a live map.

Emergencies When You Are the Only Van

An owner-operator cannot send the closest van. There is one. The decisions are different:

• Can you get there after the current job? Add it next and text the customers you are bumping.
• Can the customer stop the water? Walk them to the main shut-off on the phone.
• Is it beyond what you can take today? Be honest. Customers respect “I can be there first thing tomorrow” more than a promise you break.

Paid Before You Leave the Driveway

Owner-operators often lose more time to billing than to scheduling. When you tap Complete, the invoice is created and a card on file can be charged. Customers can also pay online from the customer app. That means no evening of writing invoices at the kitchen table.

Getting Ready for a Second Van

Many owner-operators eventually add a tech. Setting up the right habits now makes that step easier:

• Equipment and access notes on every house, so a new tech can work your customers without you.
• Every job on the board, so there is a real schedule to hand off.
• Recurring work on the Waiting List, such as yearly flushes, so maintenance does not live in your head.

When the second van arrives, add an employee with a personal PIN, assign them a van, and start filtering the board by van. The usual split, repairs and drains on one and water heaters on the other, is in Splitting the Repair & Drain Van From the Water Heater Van.

Run It All From the Truck

An owner-operator does not need a big office system. They need one phone that books, routes, texts, invoices and remembers. To see how dispatch works on the office side and the tech side, visit the PlumbingBossPro plumbing dispatch software page.