GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Technician App

The Garage Door Tech's Day in Route Order: Working the Call List Top to Bottom

A garage door tech's day used to start with a phone call or a printed sheet: here are your stops, call me if anything changes. By 10am something always changed. A spring broke across town, an install customer asked to move to the afternoon, a tune-up canceled. The printed sheet was wrong and the tech was guessing. A call list in route order on the phone fixes that.

Where the List Comes From

The tech sees this list right after signing in, as described in Logging In to the Garage Door Tech App: Company Login Plus a Personal PIN.

The list starts in the office. New repair requests, approved estimates and tune-up visits that have come due all show on the Waiting List, a live map and list of everything that needs a van. The office drags those calls onto the dispatch board, which shows jobs by day and lets you filter by van.

On the board, the office sets the route order. It can be done by hand, which is how most companies handle a day with a fixed-time install, or with auto-routing: Closest First or Furthest First from the shop. Closest First works well for a repair van that wants to knock out quick calls early. Furthest First suits an install van that wants to start at the far end and work home.

Whatever order the board shows is the order the tech's phone shows. There is one list, not a board version and a phone version.

Reading the List

Each call on the list is a card. At a glance the tech sees the customer, the address and what the call is for: broken spring, opener not lifting, door off track, yearly tune-up, new door install. Tap the card and it opens to the full detail: the door and opener on that house, the bay, access notes, past notes, and the buttons to navigate, Start, Skip or Complete.

The rule is simple: work the top card down. When a call is completed, the tech moves on to the next card. A tech who finishes early can see exactly what is next without calling anyone. A tech who is running long can see what is coming and let the office know before the next customer is left waiting.

When the Office Moves a Call

Garage door work is full of surprises. The most common is the emergency spring call: a homeowner with a car trapped in the garage and an important appointment. The office takes the call, looks at crew GPS to see which van is closest, and drops the new call into that tech's route.

Because the tech's phone follows the dispatch board, the new call simply appears in the list in the spot the office chose. There is no need to read an address over the phone or hope the tech saw a text. The whole process is covered in Broken Spring at 10am: Sliding an Emergency Call Into a Tech's Route.

The same goes for cancellations and reschedules. If a tune-up customer cancels, the office takes the call off the board and it disappears from the tech's list. If an install is moved to the afternoon, it moves down the list.

Splitting the Work Between Vans

Route order gets more useful once you have two or three vans. A common setup for garage door companies is to keep one van on repairs and emergency spring calls and the other on installs and tune-ups. The repair van gets a list of shorter, less predictable calls. The install van gets a few longer jobs with set start times.

Each tech sees only their own van's list, so the install tech is not distracted by repair calls they will never run. The office sees all the vans side by side on the dispatch board and can move work between them as the day unfolds.

Saved views on the board help here. The office can keep a view for each van, or one for commercial work, and switch between them without rebuilding filters every morning. Route sheets can also be printed for anyone who still likes paper on the dash as a backup.

Why Order Matters to Customers

Route order is not just about drive time. It is also what makes customer texts and the customer app accurate. When the tech finishes one call and heads for the next, the next customer can get an on-the-way text. The live map in the customer app shows where they are in line: “You're stop 12 of 20 — the tech is 5 stops away.”

None of that works if the tech is driving a different order than the one in the system. Working the list top to bottom keeps the promises the software makes to your customers.

From the List to the Driveway

Once the tech knows which call is next, the next step is getting there. Every card has a navigation button, which is the subject of the next guide. To see how route order fits with everything else on the tech's phone, visit the GarageDoorBossPro garage door technician app page.