PlumbingBossPro Blog — Dispatch & Scheduling

Moving Plumbing Jobs Between Days Without Losing Track of Them

No plumbing schedule survives the week unchanged. Customers cancel, parts get delayed, long jobs run over, a tech gets sick, an emergency eats the afternoon. Moving jobs is part of the work. The danger is not the move itself. It is the job that gets moved off one day and never lands on another.

Why Jobs Move

Long jobs running over, covered in Scheduling Long Plumbing Jobs: Water Heater Swaps and Repipes Next to Short Service Calls, are one of the most common reasons. Others:

• Customer reschedules. Something came up, or they found a better day.
• Emergency bump. A burst pipe took the slot.
• Waiting on a part. The tankless unit or the specific valve is not in yet.
• Tech out. One van is down for the day.
• Weather. Some outdoor work, like sewer line digs or hose bib replacements in a freeze, can wait for a better day.
• Pulling work forward. A light day opens up and you bring jobs in early.

How Moving Works on the Board

In PlumbingBossPro, a job sits on a day and a van. Moving it means changing the day, the van, or both. When you move it, it leaves one list and lands on the other. The tech whose day it left no longer sees it, and the tech whose day it joined does.

That is the key difference from a paper calendar or a whiteboard. Erasing a job from Tuesday and forgetting to write it on Thursday is easy on paper. On the board, the job is one record that moves, so it cannot fall into the gap between days.

After the Move: Route Order

A job dropped onto a new day lands in that van's list, but not necessarily in the right spot. After moving jobs:

• Moved one job? Place it by hand where it fits in the route.
• Moved several? Re-run auto-route, Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, then adjust by hand.
• Moved a long job? Put it early in the new day.

Telling the Customer

A moved job is a changed promise. Tell the customer as soon as you know, not the morning of. Two-way texting from the office makes that quick: “Hi, this is the plumbing office. Your water heater part is delayed, can we move you to Thursday morning?” Their reply comes back to the office.

Once the job is on the new day, the customer's automatic alerts follow it. If they chose a night-before reminder, it goes out the night before the new day, not the old one.

Moving a Whole Van's Day

When a tech is out, a whole day of jobs needs a new home. A simple approach:

1. Filter the board to the van that is out.
2. Pick off urgent jobs first and move them to another van on the same day if there is room.
3. Move flexible jobs, like yearly flushes and estimates, to the next open days.
4. Text every affected customer.
5. Re-route the vans that picked up extra work.

Recurring visits are often the easiest to push a few days, since they came off the Waiting List and are not tied to a promise made on the phone.

Moving Work Forward

Moving is not only about delays. When a van finishes early or a cancellation opens a gap, pull work forward:

• Look at tomorrow's jobs for that van that sit near where the tech is now, using crew GPS on the office map.
• Check the Waiting List map for due visits nearby.
• Text the customer before moving them up. Not everyone wants the plumber two hours early.

Skips Are Moves Waiting to Happen

When a tech taps Skip on a job and notes why, that job needs a new day. Skips are the moves most often forgotten, because they happen in the field instead of on the phone. Make a habit of rebooking every skip before the end of the day. The details are in Rescheduling and Skips: Handling the Plumbing Calls That Don't Happen.

The End-of-Day Check

The single best habit for keeping moves under control: before you close the office, look at today's board. Every job should be completed, skipped and rebooked, or moved to a future day. Nothing should be sitting on today as unfinished tomorrow morning. Then glance at tomorrow to make sure the moves landed where you meant.

Move Freely, Lose Nothing

Plumbing schedules change constantly. A board where jobs move as one record, techs see the change on their phones and customers' alerts follow the new day makes those changes safe. To see the rest of the dispatch tools, visit the PlumbingBossPro plumbing dispatch software page.