7 posts tagged with "Scheduling"

A number of small changes have been added to the booking portal, which lets customers schedule events into your calendar automatically.

• Customers can now attach files to their booking, to provide images for you to access prior to visiting the site
• You can group job types into categories, to help break up the list of work you offer into smaller sections
• Dark mode is now available, in addition to the standard light mode theme
• You can customise the range of dates which customers can schedule work for (previously fixed at 1-30 days), either at the booking portal level, or you can override this per job type (for example, setting a longer lead time for work which requires parts ordering)
• Same day bookings are now supported, if you opt-in (the default remains at 1-30 days)

We'll now show any bank holidays on the web interface and app calendar based on the holiday feed associated with the shift of each engineer in your account. These will appear as an all-day event and will prevent auto-scheduling from allocating events on this date as before, but you now have the ability to manually delete the event, if you've agreed with the engineer that they'll be working that day.

We've added a "Employee display settings" button to the calendar sidebar. This will take you to a popup where you can decide which employees are visible on the calendar, and drag them using the handle at the right of the list to change the order they show up in. You'll have the option to either change the settings for your account, or all users in your company.

The default ordering will remain the same as it is at present (order of employee creation), but this will give you the option to group engineers together by role, or sort alphabetically. Employee created after you configure the settings will default to being enabled and show up at the bottom of the list until you make any changes.

You now have the option to notify your engineers when they've been assigned to an event, or a task.

For events, notifications get sent once the employee locked option is checked, and only for events occurring the next 7 days.

In both cases, no notifications will be delivered if you're assigning yourself to a task or event.

We've released support for creating recurring events through the web interface, so you can automatically schedule events according to a determined pattern (eg. every x days, every other Monday, 1st of every month), and choose how these are associated to jobs (whether this be unassociated with a job, all assigned to the same job, or a new job being created every x months).

You're able to access this feature through the new "Recurrence" tab on the event create/edit popup from the web interface's calendar page. For events with an associated series, the update button will present the option to apply any changes made to either the selected event, or this plus all future events, while the delete button will allow deletion of either the single event, or all future events.

Support for managing recurring events through the app is planned in our development backlog, but we have no timeline for this at this stage. Please reach out to support to register your interest in this so we can correctly prioritise this!

We've extended our automatic reminders feature to now include support for events in addition to the previous quotes, invoices and forms. This will allow you to automatically send your customers email or SMS messages at a specified offset prior to or after the event's start date, for example, to remind them of a booking and give them a chance to contact you if they need to re-arrange, or to send a post visit feedback request to see how things went.

Like all existing reminder types, custom conditions can be used, for example, to configure reminder types on a per job type basis. Please reach out to support for assistance with setting up conditional reminders, as the self-service interface for this currently isn't very beginner friendly.

We're rolling out some large changes to how locations associated with events work, to increase the flexibility offered by the calendar and automatic scheduling.

Prior to this update, events could either be associated with a job or not. Events associated with a job always took place at the job's site address, and non-job events had no location. Some users had to work around this limitation by opening jobs whenever they needed to schedule work at an address, which added admin time, and made job status summaries less useful.

From this update, events themselves have a location, which for all historic events, defaults to the job address, or no address for events without jobs.

This means you can create non-job events with a location, such as for meetings and training, to allow the app to present navigation options.

For job events, you can remove the address from the event, allowing you to schedule in time for calls with customers, or to survey properties online proior to work with software such as Zoom to save on travel time. You're also able to assign a different property to one event, for example, to set an address where keys need to be picked up and returned to in order to access the site's main property.