ElectricalBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

The Electrical Dispatch Board: Every Job by Day and by Van

Every electrical company has a dispatch board, even if it is a whiteboard in the shop, a paper calendar on the owner's desk or a spreadsheet that one person knows how to read. The question is whether the board can answer the questions the office actually asks all day: what is Van 2 doing tomorrow, who has room for one more call this afternoon, and did anyone book that generator install yet?

Starting From the Big Picture

The overview in Electrician Scheduling Software: The Complete Guide to Scheduling and Dispatching an Electrical Service Company explains where the board sits between incoming work and paid invoices. This guide is about the board itself.

In ElectricalBossPro the dispatch board is the Scheduled List. It shows every scheduled job by day. Each job carries its address, client, service, van assignment and place in the route. Pick a day and you see everything happening that day across the company. Move forward a day and you see tomorrow.

Filtering by Van

An all-company view is useful for the owner. A single-van view is what the dispatcher works in. Filter the board to one van and it shows only that van's jobs in route order. That is the same list the tech sees on their phone in the tech app.

Most electrical shops with two or three vans organize them by type of work:

• Service van. Outlets, GFCIs, breakers, fixtures, ceiling fans, troubleshooting, smoke detectors. Many short stops.
• Install van. Panel upgrades, EV charger installs, generator installs, dedicated circuits. One or two long jobs a day.
• Maintenance and inspections. Yearly safety inspections and generator maintenance pulled from the Waiting List.

Filtering by van lets the dispatcher look at each kind of day on its own terms. A service route with ten stops and an install day with one stop look nothing alike, and they should not be squeezed into the same view. For more on dividing the work, see One Van on Service, One on Installs: Splitting Electrical Work Between Vans.

What You Do on the Board

The board is where the day gets built. From the Scheduled List the office can:

• Assign a job to a van and a day
• Auto-route a van Closest First or Furthest First from the shop
• Set the route order by hand
• Move a job to a different day or a different van
• Save the filters used every morning as a saved view
• Print a route sheet for a van's day

Each of these has its own guide in this series. The point here is that they all happen in one place. Nobody has to update the whiteboard, then text the tech, then update a spreadsheet. The board is the schedule, and the tech app reads from it.

The Board and the Tech App Agree

The most expensive scheduling mistake in a small electrical shop is a tech working from an old list. The office moved a call to tomorrow, but the tech still had the printout from this morning and drove there anyway. Or the office added an urgent call and the tech never saw the text.

When the board and the tech app are the same data, that stops happening. A job added to Van 1 for today appears on the Van 1 tech's phone. A job moved to another day leaves the list. A change in route order shows up the next time the tech looks at the list. Techs log in with the company login and a personal PIN, so each one sees their own van's day.

The Board Shows the Day Getting Done

As techs work, their taps come back to the board. Start marks a job underway. Complete marks it done, with photos and notes attached and the invoice created. Skip marks it not done, with the tech's note saying why. By mid-afternoon the dispatcher can look at a van's day and see what is finished, what is in progress and what is left.

That matters when the phone rings. A customer calls at 1pm with a tripping breaker. The dispatcher filters to the service van, sees three stops left, checks the crew GPS on the office map, and knows whether today is realistic before promising anything.

Looking Ahead

The board is not only for today. Stepping forward through the week shows how full each van is. An install van with nothing booked Thursday is a day to fill with an EV charger install or a generator job from the estimate pile. A service van already stacked on Monday is a reason to put the next non-urgent call on Tuesday.

Recurring work feeds the board from the Waiting List. When yearly safety inspections and generator maintenance come due, the office assigns them to open days, often grouping them by neighborhood so one van covers a cluster in a single day.

One Board Instead of Three

Most shops that move off a whiteboard are not trading up from nothing. They are replacing a whiteboard, a calendar and a group text that had to be kept in sync by hand. A single dispatch board by day and van does the job of all three, and the tech's phone and the customer's live map follow from it. To see how the board connects to routing, the Waiting List and customer texts, visit the ElectricalBossPro electrician scheduling software page.