Field service scheduling and dispatch
- What that travel time would invoice
- $41,081.04
- Jobs the team completes a day
- 31.200000000000003
- Jobs a month
- 655.2
Every figure printed on this site is arithmetic on the worked example we publish: 6 technicians completing 5.2 jobs a day across 21 working days at an average invoice of $285, with 22% of the day spent travelling; 655 service calls a month of which 14% are rescheduled at 0.18 hours each by a dispatcher costing $32 an hour and 6% never happen; and 240 service agreements at 2 planned visits a year, 1.3 technician hours each at $58, charged at $145 a visit. Change any of those on a worksheet and the numbers change with them. Nothing here is a market statistic and nothing is quoted from a third party.
Field service scheduling and dispatch is two jobs that get bought as one product, and confusing them is why so many boards get abandoned in the third week. Scheduling is deciding what happens tomorrow. Dispatching is deciding what happens in the next twenty minutes, when the first job has already run long. A tool that is good at one is often useless at the other, so this page separates them and says what each half has to do.
Open the Field service schedule Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Schedule against capacity, not against a calendar
A calendar will happily accept eleven jobs for a team that completes six. Capacity is technicians multiplied by the jobs one of them really finishes in a day, and on the worked example this site publishes that is 6 people at 5.2 jobs, so 31.2 a day and no more. Booking past that number does not create work, it creates the phone call that moves it.
Promise a window you can hold, then hold it
A four hour window that is met beats a one hour window that is missed, every time and for the same customer. Windows are also where travel hides: the drive between two jobs is working time when it falls inside the day, which is the rule the Department of Labor sets out, and a board that treats it as free will overbook every technician on it.
Dispatch is a different decision from scheduling
When the first call runs ninety minutes long somebody has to choose which of the remaining jobs slips, and that choice needs the technician location, the promise made, and the customer who has already been moved once. A schedule that cannot be redealt at eleven in the morning is a plan, and the day stopped following the plan an hour ago.
The job is not finished until the paperwork is on it
A completed job produces a work order, usually an estimate before it and an invoice after, and if those live in a different system from the schedule then somebody retypes them. The point of holding both is not tidiness: it is that the record of what was done is attached to the record of who was sent and when they got there.
Dispatchzo Pro
Keeping the board, not just the answer
You have the number. Pro keeps the board it describes: every job, every technician, every window and every document the job produced.
- Download the finished sheet as a file
- Send it without the Dispatchzo line on it
- Save a sheet and reopen it next month
- Put your company name and logo on it
- Export every customer, job and document at once
- Jobs emailed to whoever is going to them
- Connect your own Stripe account and get paid online
- Connect your QuickBooks Online or Xero
$69per month, whole team
Start Dispatchzo Pro PricingDispatchzo Pro is $69 a month and renews automatically each month at $69 until you cancel. There is no minimum term, no per technician charge, and the price does not change on renewal.
What a dispatcher asks before running the Field service scheduling and dispatch
Is this the same as route optimisation? No. Route optimisation solves the driving order for a fixed set of stops. This decides which jobs go on the day at all, who takes them, and what happens when one runs long. If your problem is genuinely the driving order, buy a router.
How many technicians before this is worth having? Two. One technician can be dispatched from memory. At two the office starts holding two versions of the day, and at four the whiteboard is redrawn every afternoon.
What does it cost? All three worksheets are free forever. Keeping the board as a record is $69 a month for the whole team, not per technician.
Will it fit your week? Ask us about Field service scheduling and dispatch
Tell us how many technicians you dispatch and what the schedule lives in today.