GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Dispatching Commercial Dock Door Calls Alongside Residential Work

A residential garage door company that takes on commercial accounts usually does it one call at a time. A warehouse down the road has a dock door stuck half open. A property manager calls about a rolling door on a storage building. A townhome HOA wants someone to look at every garage on the block. Before long, commercial work is a real part of the week, and it has to share vans with the spring calls.

Commercial Calls Are Still Route Stops

Building days around a cluster of addresses is the theme of Filling a Garage Door Route by Area: Building Days From the Map. Commercial work fits the same thinking, with a few extra wrinkles.

In GarageDoorBossPro, a commercial address is a stop like any other. It goes on a day and a van on the dispatch board, gets routed with the rest of the van's jobs, and shows up on the tech's phone in order. What makes it different is the client behind it, the doors at the address, and the hours the business keeps.

One Client, Many Addresses

Commercial clients usually come with more than one location. A property manager might have a dozen buildings. An HOA might have a row of townhomes, each with its own garage. A business might have a main warehouse and a satellite shop. GarageDoorBossPro keeps one client with many addresses, and each address keeps its own doors and hardware.

That matters for dispatch, because a call from the property manager about “the dock door at the Elm Street building” goes to that address, with that address's doors on the job card: a commercial sectional door with its size and material, or a commercial rolling door, the bay labeled “commercial dock,” and any access notes like “check in at the front office, ask for the shift lead.”

Business Hours Shape the Route

The biggest scheduling difference with commercial work is time. A residential customer can often leave a keypad code. A warehouse may only be reachable while the dock is staffed, and the dock door may be in constant use while trucks are loading. A few common patterns:

• Early stops. A storefront rolling door is easiest before the store opens. Put it first on the route by hand.
• Mid-day windows. A dock might be quiet between morning and afternoon shipments. Slot the stop there.
• Before closing. If a business closes at three, the stop cannot be the last one of a long route.

Auto-routing will not know any of this, so run the auto-route, then set route order by hand for the commercial stops. Put the hours in the job notes so the tech knows why the route bends.

Which Van Takes It

An urgent commercial call, like a dock door that will not close at the end of the day, is a same-day call and usually goes to the repair van, the same as a broken residential spring. A planned commercial job, like replacing a rolling door or a set of sections, behaves more like an install and goes to the install van on a booked day.

Some shops have one tech who handles most of the commercial work. If that tech rides the repair van, commercial calls land there. If the shop grows its commercial side, it may make sense to give that tech a van that runs mostly commercial routes, with residential calls filling the gaps. The board handles any of these, because it is just jobs on vans.

Telling the Commercial Customer

Commercial customers like to know when the tech is coming as much as homeowners do, maybe more, since someone has to meet the tech or clear the dock. The automatic on-the-way and arrived texts go to the contact on file, and the office can text back and forth with the property manager or shift lead through two-way texting. Night-before reminders help planned visits, so nobody is surprised when the van pulls up.

Billing Many Addresses on One Statement

Commercial accounts usually do not want an invoice every time a tech touches a door. A property manager, HOA or commercial account set to Monthly gets one statement each month covering every address, with each line labeled with the address. Dispatch can treat each visit as its own stop, and billing still rolls up neatly at the end of the month.

Recurring Commercial Maintenance

Many commercial accounts want planned maintenance, not just emergency repairs. Commercial door maintenance can be set to come back on its own, for example every 90 days. Each address on the plan shows up on the Waiting List map when its visit comes due, so a property manager's buildings can be batched into one or two route days. That is the subject of the next article, Scheduling Commercial Door Maintenance Every 90 Days.

For how commercial calls fit with the rest of scheduling and dispatch, go back to the garage door scheduling software page.