PlumbingBossPro Blog — Dispatch & Scheduling

Moving Plumbing Scheduling Off the Whiteboard and the Paper Calendar

A whiteboard has carried a lot of plumbing companies a long way. It is visible, flexible and cheap. The trouble shows up as the company grows: the board cannot reach the techs, it does not know where anyone is, and when somebody erases a job to move it, the job sometimes never comes back. At some point, the whiteboard costs more than it saves.

Growth Is Usually the Trigger

An owner-operator, as in Dispatching From the Truck: The Owner-Operator Plumber's Schedule, can sometimes get away with a notebook. Add a second van and an office person, and paper starts to strain. Add a third and it breaks.

What Paper Cannot Do

• Reach the tech. Every change on the whiteboard needs a phone call or a group text to reach the van.
• Know where vans are. The dispatcher calls around to find out.
• Route the day. The order is whatever someone wrote first.
• Tell the customer. No automatic reminders, no on-the-way text.
• Remember recurring work. Yearly flushes live on a separate calendar, or nowhere.
• Keep history. Once a job is erased, what happened is gone.

Step One: Get Customers and Addresses In

Start with your customer list. PlumbingBossPro supports CSV import, and imported addresses are placed on the map automatically. One client can have many addresses, which matters for landlords, property managers and restaurant groups.

Do not wait for perfect data. Equipment records, access notes and tags can fill in over time as techs visit.

Step Two: Set Up Vans and Techs

Add each employee with a personal PIN and assign them to a van. Decide how work is split, for example one van on repairs and drains and one on water heaters and maintenance. Show each tech how to log in to the tech app on their own phone with the company login and their PIN. It runs in the browser on iPhone and Android and can be installed to the home screen.

Step Three: Run Both for a Week

Do not flip everything in one day. For the first week:

• Put every job on the dispatch board.
• Keep the whiteboard up as a backup and copy from the board to the whiteboard, not the other way round.
• Print route sheets for techs who want paper.
• Ask techs to use Start, Skip and Complete on their phones, even if they also check the sheet.

By the end of the week, most offices notice they are not looking at the whiteboard anymore.

Step Four: Move Recurring Work

Recurring work is where paper fails quietly. Set up yearly water heater flushes, softener service, backflow tests and grease-line jetting as recurring work, with minimum days between visits. From then on, each visit comes due on the Waiting List map on its own.

Start with your most important recurring customers and add the rest over a few weeks.

Step Five: Turn On Customer Texts

Once the board is the real schedule, turn on customer alerts. Customers choose night-before, when they're next and arrived texts. This is usually the moment the office notices fewer calls, which is when everyone stops missing the whiteboard.

Step Six: Take the Whiteboard Down

Really. Leaving it up means somebody will keep writing on it, and then you have two schedules that disagree. If you want something on the wall, print route sheets from the board each morning and pin those up instead.

Pick a Quiet Week to Start

Timing matters. Switching the schedule during the first hard freeze of the winter, when burst pipes are ringing the phone off the hook, is asking for trouble. Pick a week that is usually calmer for your shop, and tell your techs and office person a few days ahead what will change and why. A short meeting on a Monday morning does more than any written instructions.

Common Worries

• “My techs won't use it.” The tech app is a few buttons: navigation, Start, Skip, Complete. Most techs pick it up in a ride-along.
• “I'll lose the flexibility.” Moving a job between days or vans is quicker on the board than erasing and rewriting.
• “It's too expensive.” Plans are $59, $89 or $199 a month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card.

Avoiding the most common slip-ups along the way is covered in Plumbing Scheduling Mistakes That Cost You a Day, and How to Avoid Them.

From Board to Board

Moving off the whiteboard is not about technology for its own sake. It is about getting changes to techs without phone calls, knowing where vans are and letting customers know when you are coming. To see the dispatch board that replaces the whiteboard, visit the PlumbingBossPro plumbing dispatch software page.