GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Garage Door Software

The Waiting List: How Garage Door Software Brings Yearly Tune-Ups Back on Time

Repair calls find you. Tune-ups do not. A homeowner with a broken spring will call until someone answers, but a homeowner on a yearly tune-up plan will wait politely for you to remember them. If you do not, the plan quietly lapses. The Waiting List in GarageDoorBossPro is how you remember them all.

Tune-Ups and the Inspection Report

The report homeowners get after a tune-up is covered in The Printed Garage Door Safety Inspection Report: What the Homeowner Takes Away. That report is what the customer gets. The Waiting List is how the visit comes around again.

Tune-up plans are often the steadiest work a garage door company has. They fill slow weeks, they keep you in front of customers, and they turn up repairs before they become emergencies. They only work if every visit actually happens.

Recurring Work by Minimum Days

Recurring work in GarageDoorBossPro is set by the minimum number of days between visits:

• 365 days for a yearly residential tune-up plan
• 90 days, for example, for commercial door maintenance
• Any other number that matches how you sell your plans

Counting days instead of picking a calendar date means each customer comes due a set time after their last visit. If a tune-up ran late last year, this year's comes due from when it was actually done.

The Map and the List

The Waiting List is a live map plus a list of every visit that has come due, along with new service requests. Each pin is colored by status:

• Not due yet
• Due now
• Overdue, once it has slipped past a 7-day grace

The map is what makes this useful for a garage door company. You can see that six tune-ups are due on the north side, three of them overdue, and that there is a new request for a noisy opener two streets over. That is a day for one van.

From Waiting List to Schedule

The office picks visits from the Waiting List, assigns them to a van and a day, and they move onto the dispatch board. From there the board can auto-route the day Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, and the tech's phone shows the same order. The details of dispatch are in Dispatching Garage Door Calls: The Scheduled List, Vans and Route Order.

When a tune-up job is created, the From House picker fills in the doors, openers and springs on that house, so the tech arrives with the equipment on the card and the door safety checklist ready.

Filling Slow Days

Garage door work is lumpy. Some days the phone does not stop ringing with broken springs and off-track doors. Other days are quiet. The Waiting List turns quiet days into productive ones. When the repair calls are light, the office opens the map, finds a cluster of due and overdue tune-ups, and books them.

On busy days, the same map tells you which tune-ups can safely wait a few days because they are only just due, and which have been waiting too long.

Getting Customers Onto Plans

The Waiting List only knows about customers who are on a plan. There are a few ways to get them there:

• The office adds a tune-up plan to the customer after a repair visit.
• The customer signs up for a tune-up plan in the customer app, with the pricing you set, for example a $129 yearly tune-up.
• The sign-up form on your website captures the customer and card, and one click converts the sign-up into a client.

Once they are on a plan, they come due on their own every year.

Reminders for the Customer

When a tune-up is scheduled, the customer can get a reminder the night before, a text when they are next, and a text when the tech arrives, depending on the alerts they choose. A tune-up customer who knows the van is coming makes sure the car is out of the garage and someone can open the door.

New Requests on the Same Map

The Waiting List is not only tune-ups. New service requests from the customer app and the website land on the same map. That puts a request for a noisy opener next to the three tune-ups due on the same street, and the office can send one van to handle all of them in one trip instead of three.

It also gives the office one place to look each morning. Everything that is waiting for a day and a van, whether it is a plan visit that came due or a homeowner who just asked for help, is on one map and one list.

The Waiting List is the piece that keeps recurring garage door work from slipping. See how it connects with the rest of the system on the GarageDoorBossPro garage door software page.