GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Saved Views on the Garage Door Dispatch Board

A garage door office looks at the same few slices of the schedule over and over. Today for the repair van. Today for the install van. Tomorrow for everyone. This week's installs. Setting the same filters by hand twenty times a day is small, but it adds up, and it is exactly the kind of small friction that makes people go back to a whiteboard. Saved views remove it.

From Printing to Clicking

Printing a van's day each morning is covered in Printing Garage Door Route Sheets for the Van. Saved views make that morning routine, and every other check during the day, a single click.

In GarageDoorBossPro, the dispatch board can be filtered by day and by van. A saved view keeps a setup you use often so you can come back to it without rebuilding it. Give it a plain name, like “Repair Van Today,” and it is there whenever you need it.

Views Most Garage Door Offices Use

Every shop ends up with its own set, but a few show up almost everywhere:

• All Vans Today. The whole company's day. The first thing to open in the morning and the view to keep up while the phones are busy.
• Repair Van Today. The van that takes same-day spring calls and stuck doors. The view to check every time an urgent call comes in.
• Install Van This Week. For answering “when can you put my new door in?” without clicking through each day.
• Tomorrow, All Vans. For building the next day's planned work in the afternoon, so night-before reminders go out on time.
• Each Tech's Day. Handy for the owner who wants to check one tech's route before a ride-along.

Faster Same-Day Decisions

Saved views pay off most when the phone rings with something urgent. A car trapped in the garage cannot wait while the dispatcher sets filters. With saved views, the dispatcher opens the repair van's day, sees what is left, glances at crew GPS on the office map, and decides. The new job goes on the van, gets moved up the route, and appears on the tech's phone.

The same applies to quotes for installs. When a homeowner approves a new door estimate and wants a date, the install van's week is one click away.

The end of the day benefits too. A quick look at Repair Van Today at four o'clock shows which calls are still open and whether any need to move to tomorrow. Then Tomorrow, All Vans shows whether the morning is already full before the office promises anyone a first-thing slot.

Different People, Different Views

In a shop with office user roles, different people look at the board differently. The owner might want every van, every day. The person answering phones might live on today's repair van. Whoever books installs might mostly look at the install van's next two weeks. Saved views let each of them get to the slice of the board they actually use in one click.

It also helps when someone covers for someone else. If the regular dispatcher is out, the person filling in can open the same saved views and see the board the same way.

Views and the Rest of the Day

Saved views sit alongside the other dispatch tools rather than replacing any of them. A typical morning might go like this: open All Vans Today, check that every job has a van, auto-route each van Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, then open Repair Van Today and leave it up for the phones. Mid-morning, check the Waiting List map for anything due near where the install van will be in the afternoon. In the afternoon, open Tomorrow, All Vans and build the planned work.

For more on building the planned part of a day from the map, see Filling a Garage Door Route by Area: Building Days From the Map.

Keep the List Short

Saved views work best when there are only a handful. Five well-named views that cover the daily routine are more useful than twenty that nobody remembers. If a view has not been useful in a month, drop it. If the shop adds a van, add a view for it. Name views for what they show, not for who made them, so anyone in the office can tell what each one is.

Review the list when the business changes. A new commercial account with its own maintenance rounds, a season of heavy install work, or a new tech on a new van are all good reasons to add a view, and to retire one that no longer matches how the shop runs.

A short list also makes it easier to train someone new. Show them the five views, tell them when to open each one, and they are dispatching on day one.

For how saved views fit with the dispatch board, routing and the Waiting List, go back to the garage door scheduling software page.