GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Adding a Second Garage Door Van: How Dispatch Changes

Adding a second van is one of the biggest steps a garage door company takes. It lets the company say yes to far more work in a day, but only if the work gets divided well. Plenty of owners find that the second van's first month is mostly spent figuring out who goes where, with a lot of phone calls in between.

From One Route to Two

Running a one-van shop is covered in Scheduling a One-Van Garage Door Company: The Owner-Operator's Day. With a second van, the owner stops being the only route and starts being a dispatcher too, at least part of the time.

In GarageDoorBossPro, the setup is short. Add the new tech as an employee with their own PIN, assign them to the new van, and the dispatch board can be filtered by either van. The new tech logs in to the tech app with the company login and their PIN and sees only their own route.

Deciding the Split

The first decision is how to divide the work. Three common options:

• By type. One van on repairs and emergency spring calls, one on installs and tune-ups. The most common split in garage door companies.
• By area. One van on the north half of the service area, one on the south, each doing everything.
• By experience. The owner keeps the hard repairs, commercial doors and installs; the new tech takes tune-ups, sensors, openers and straightforward spring calls.

Many shops start with experience, while the new tech learns, and move to type once both techs can handle any job. For more on the type split, see Repair Van, Install Van: Splitting a Garage Door Fleet on the Dispatch Board.

Someone Has to Answer the Phone

With one van, the owner answers calls between jobs. With two, the calls double, and someone needs to dispatch them. In some shops the owner keeps doing it from the van. In others, a spouse, a part-time office person or the owner working from the shop takes over. Office user roles let you give the office person their own login to work the board.

Whoever dispatches needs the same few things: the board filtered by van, crew GPS on the office map to see where each van is, and the Waiting List map for filling gaps. Saved views make each of those one click.

Keeping Both Routes in Sync

The big risk with two vans is that the routes drift apart from what the office thinks. A tech skips ahead, a job moves without a note, a customer gets told the wrong time. The fix is to make the board the single place decisions are recorded. When a job moves between vans, it moves on the board, and it leaves one tech's phone and shows up on the other's. When a tech wants to change the order, they text the office, and the office changes it on the board.

Customers stay in the loop on their own. On-the-way and arrived texts come from whichever tech is actually coming, and the customer app's live map shows the real route.

A short morning routine helps: check both vans' days on the board, auto-route each one, adjust for time windows, and confirm both techs can see their routes on their phones. Then keep the repair van's day loose for the calls that will come in.

Sharing the Customer History

One quiet benefit of a second van is that customers no longer depend on the owner remembering their house. Everything is on the property: the doors and hardware saved on it, past notes, past inspection results. When the new tech pulls up to a house the owner has been to five times, the job card shows “Bay 1 · the left door is the problem” and the history of what was done before. The new tech can do the job the way the owner would.

Using the Second Van Well

A second van is only worth its cost if it is busy. Early on, the new tech's days may have gaps. The Waiting List map is the answer: due yearly tune-ups, commercial maintenance visits and new requests, grouped by area, are perfect work for a new tech learning the ropes. Selling more tune-up plans while the second van ramps up builds a steady base of planned work for it.

As the shop grows to a third van, the same tools keep working. Each van is a filter on the board and a route on a phone. Plans run $59 for Start, $89 for Pro and $199 for Crew a month, so compare them on the pricing page.

For how dispatch fits with routing, the Waiting List and customer texts, go back to the garage door scheduling software page.