HVACBossPro Blog — HVAC Software

The HVAC Dispatch Board: Days, Vans and Route Order on One Screen

The whiteboard in most HVAC shops does one thing well: it shows the whole day at a glance. It does everything else badly. It cannot be read from a van, it forgets everything at night, and nobody can tell from it whether the 2pm call is done. A dispatch board in software keeps the glance and fixes the rest.

From Waiting List to Board

Tune-ups reach the board from the Waiting List, as covered in The Waiting List: Every HVAC Tune-Up That Has Come Due on One Map. Service calls reach it straight from the phone, a text or a website request. Either way, once a job has a day and a van, it lives on the dispatch board.

In HVACBossPro the board is called the Scheduled List. It is where the office builds each day and watches it happen.

What the Board Shows

The dispatch board lays out jobs by day. For each job you see the customer, the address, the kind of visit and the equipment line under the address, the same “Heat Pump · 2.5 ton · installed 2016 · filter 20x25x1” the tech will see. From there you can:

• Filter by van or truck. See just Van 1's day, or everything at once.
• Set route order. Put stops in the order the tech should run them.
• Auto-route. Let the software order the day Closest First or Furthest First from the shop.
• Drag work between days. Move a tune-up from Tuesday to Thursday when Tuesday fills with repair calls.

Whatever order the board shows is the order on the tech's phone. Change it in the office and the phone follows.

Auto-Route or Hand-Route?

Both have a place in an HVAC day.

Auto-route on tune-up days. A van with ten or twelve agreement visits spread across one side of town is exactly what auto-routing is for. Closest First starts near the shop and works outward; Furthest First drives out first and works back toward the shop at the end of the day. Pick whichever suits where your techs live and where they park the van.

Hand-route on repair days. Repair calls come with promises: “after 1pm,” “before the kids get home,” “no heat, elderly customer, first thing.” The office knows those priorities better than any algorithm. Set the order by hand, and move things as new calls come in.

Many days are a mix. Auto-route the tune-ups, then drag the one urgent call to the top.

Whichever you choose, glance at the result on the map before the van leaves. A route that looks sensible as a list can still double back across a highway, and the office will spot that in seconds where a tech would only find out at the third stop.

One Van on Repairs, One on Tune-Ups

The most common setup for a two-to-five van HVAC shop is to split the work by van:

• Repair van(s). Take service calls as they come, routed by hand around customer windows and urgency.
• Tune-up van. Runs an auto-routed day of agreement visits pulled from the Waiting List.
• Owner or senior tech. Replacement estimates, tricky diagnostics and light commercial work.

Filtering the board by van makes this easy to manage. When a heat wave buries the repair van, the office can move the tune-up van onto repair calls for a few days and drag its tune-ups later in the week. Nothing is lost; it is just moved.

Watching the Day Happen

The board is not just for planning. As techs work, it shows what is happening:

• Start means the tech is on the way, and the customer gets an automatic on-the-way text.
• Complete means the job is done, with photos and notes attached and the invoice created.
• Skip comes with the tech's note: nobody home, could not reach the attic, customer cancelled at the door.

Crew GPS shows each van on the office map, so when a new no-cool call comes in, the office can see which tech is closest and slot it into their route. The tech side of this is in The HVAC Tech App: What Your Technicians See on Their Phones.

Dispatch Habits for Small Shops

• Build tomorrow before you leave today. Techs can look ahead, load the right filters and plan their morning.
• Leave a gap on repair days. An empty slot in the afternoon absorbs the call that always comes in at 11am.
• Handle skips the same day. Text the customer, fix the access note and put the job on a new day before the end of the afternoon.
• Keep the board the only schedule. If the whiteboard, a paper list and the software all exist, one of them will be wrong.

To see how the dispatch board fits with equipment records, the tech app and billing, visit the HVAC software page.