GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Auto-Routing Garage Door Calls: Closest First or Furthest First From the Shop

Putting jobs on a van is half of dispatch. The other half is the order. Six garage door calls spread across a county can be a tidy loop or a day of crossing the same highway four times, and the difference shows up in fuel, in overtime and in how many calls the van can still take after lunch.

Order Comes After the Board

How jobs get onto a van and a day is covered in The Garage Door Dispatch Board: Every Job by Day and by Van. Once a van has its jobs for the day, GarageDoorBossPro can sort them for you.

Auto-routing works from the shop. Pick the van and the day, choose Closest First or Furthest First, and the route order is set. The tech's phone shows the jobs in that order, top to bottom, each with a navigation button.

Closest First

Closest First starts with the job nearest the shop and works outward. It is the natural fit for a garage door repair van, for a few reasons:

• Quick wins early. The first calls are a short drive away, so the tech is working instead of driving in the first hour.
• Close to parts. If the first job needs a spring size the van does not carry, the shop is still nearby.
• Room for the phone. A repair van that clears the close calls first is often still in the middle of the service area when the next same-day spring call comes in.

Closest First is also a good default for owner-operators who start and end at the same shop and want the morning to move.

The one thing to watch with Closest First is the end of the day. The last stop is the farthest one, so a tech who runs long on an off-track door at stop three may find the final call is a long drive at four in the afternoon. That is often the right job to hand to another van, or to move to the top of tomorrow's route with a quick text to the homeowner.

Furthest First

Furthest First does the opposite. The tech drives to the farthest job first, then works back toward the shop. It suits a different kind of day:

• Tune-up days on the edge of the area. A batch of yearly tune-ups in a town forty minutes out is best tackled with the long drive done while the tech is fresh.
• Ending near home. The last stop is near the shop, so the van gets back in for restocking without a long empty drive at the end.
• Commercial accounts with early hours. A business that opens early but is far out can be the first stop of the day.

Picking the Right One for the Van

Most garage door companies end up with a habit: the repair van usually runs Closest First, and the install and tune-up van picks based on where the day's work is. If the tune-ups are clustered on the far side of town, Furthest First. If they are scattered around the shop, Closest First.

For installs, auto-routing matters less. An install van with one new door in the morning and a tune-up in the afternoon has two stops, and the order is usually decided by the customer's schedule. That is where manual route order comes in, covered in Setting Garage Door Route Order by Hand When the Day Needs a Tweak.

Re-Routing When the Day Changes

Auto-routing is not a one-time thing. When a same-day call goes onto a van, the office can run the auto-route again for that van to see where the new job fits, or just slot it in by hand. When a job gets moved to tomorrow, the rest of the route closes up.

Because the tech's phone shows whatever order the board has, a re-route does not need a phone call. The tech finishes the current job, looks at the next card, and goes. Customers further down the list still get their on-the-way and arrived texts when the tech actually heads their way, so the re-route does not leave anyone guessing.

What Auto-Routing Does Not Do

Auto-routing sorts by distance from the shop. It does not know that one homeowner can only meet the tech before 10, that a commercial dock is closed after 3, or that a particular tech is the one who knows the old opener in the detached shop. Those are judgment calls, and the office makes them by moving stops by hand after the auto-route runs.

That split works well in practice. Let the software handle the geography, then spend a minute adjusting for the people. To see how routing fits with the Waiting List map, crew GPS and customer texts, go back to the garage door scheduling software page.