Using the Dispatch Board

Availability: all plans

The Dispatch board is a day or week grid with one row per technician. You use it to see how loaded each technician is, find scheduled visits that nobody has been assigned to, and drag a work order to a new day, time or technician. This guide walks through reading the board and moving work.

Before you start

You need a role that can open the Dispatch tab under Schedule. To drag work you also need permission to manage the schedule. To drag a work order from one technician to another you need permission to assign and dispatch as well. A role that can only reschedule gets the message "Your role can reschedule work for the same technician, but cannot reassign it."

A work order must belong to a job whose location has a time zone, because the new time is set in that location's time zone.

Steps

Open Schedule, then Dispatch. Choose Day or Week. Use the arrows beside the date field, pick a date, or choose Today.
Read the summary under the date: the number scheduled, the number in progress, and either a conflict count or No conflicts.
Read the Needs assignment list. It shows scheduled visits in the range that have no technician, with time, customer and address. Choose Assign work order or Assign job owner to open the record and assign someone, or Open assessment for an assessment visit. All jobs without an owner and Unscheduled jobs open the jobs list filtered to those groups.
Read each technician row. The label under the name is Available, Near capacity, Over capacity, Off duty or Working hours not set. A percentage appears once the technician is past 80 percent of declared working hours. Days the technician does not work are shaded.
To move a work order, drag its card to another day cell. A card with a red border and Conflict overlaps another booking. Choose Open work order on a card to see its detail instead.
Dropping a card on a different technician's row asks Reassign this work order? Dropping it on another day in the same row asks Move this work order? Choose Reassign or Move to confirm. The start time stays the same; the day and technician change.
The page reloads with "Work order rescheduled successfully" or "Work order reassigned and rescheduled successfully". The board shows each work order in the row of every crew member on it.

The cards at the bottom of the board show Total Technicians, Available, Busy and Over Capacity for the selected date.

Tips

You can only drop a card on another technician for a day that technician has working hours. Otherwise you see Technician is not working that day. Add working hours or an exception first; that is covered in the team availability guides.
Dragging changes the day, not the time of day. To change the time, open the work order and reschedule it there.

If something goes wrong

A conflict message names the clash and nothing changes. Choose a different day or technician.
"That local time does not exist because of daylight-saving time" means the start time falls in the skipped hour. Choose another time.
"The job location needs a valid timezone before it can be rescheduled" means the job's location has no time zone. Fix the location first.
"Technician workload could not be loaded" or "Scheduled work could not be loaded" means the board data did not arrive. Refresh before you rely on the Needs assignment list.
If cards do not drag, your role cannot manage the schedule.

Dispatch Overview — Dispatch is where you see who is working what and move visits between days, times and technicians. It lives in the Schedule area and draws from the same scheduled work orders as the schedule itself…
Manage the schedule — ServiceVisit lets you put a Work Order on the calendar and move it later. From a Job's page you can schedule one of its Work Orders by choosing a date, a start time and a duration; the end time is…
Assign and dispatch appointments — Once work is on the schedule, this is the permission that lets you move it from one technician to another. On the Dispatch board, dragging a Work Order card to a different technician's row is a…
Manage Dispatch — ServiceVisit lets you manage dispatch, which means deciding which technicians work a Work Order. You would use it when a Work Order needs more than one person. It also puts the Dispatch tab in the…