How does your business operate when it comes to overdue work?

If you have lots of recurring jobs on your schedule and you need to replan some appointments, would you want them to:

a. stay as they were?

or

b. update to retain the frequency set?

Here's an example:

A 4 weekly appointment that is normally on Mondays is completed on the Friday of that week, 4 days late.

If you don't update the schedule, the following appointment will stick to the original schedule like this:

Originally planned for Monday 13th March, completed on Friday 17th March,

Next appointment: Monday 10th April with a 3 week and 3 day gap between appointments, then returning back to the 4 weekly cycle after this next appointment on Mondays every 4 weeks.

If you do update the schedule, the following appointment will move to retain the frequency and be updated like this:

Originally planned for Monday 13th March, completed on Friday 17th March,

Next appointment: Friday 14th April retaining the 4 week frequency between appointments and continuing to keep this frequency then on Fridays every 4 weeks from there.

How to enable this setting

This setting is set globally in settings under jobs and scheduling and affects all replanned jobs that have the schedule set on the job rather than the round.

There are a few ways to replan jobs, one doesn't perform a check and automatically uses the global setting, the other allows a toggle to be switched away from the global setting.

When multi-selecting jobs from the work planner or 'my work' and then selecting a new date on the chart at the top, the check isn't performed and the jobs move using the global setting.

If instead the replan dialog is opened by selecting the jobs you wish to move and pressing on the 'replan' action to the top right, a toggle at the top of the dialog will allow you to switch between updating the schedules and only moving the selected appointments leaving the future schedules as they were.

If a job is scheduled as a part of a scheduled round, only the appointment can be replanned, the schedule can't be updated from the planners, only the round as a whole from the rounds view, which segues nicely to my next tip!

Round Organisation with colours and the Visual Planner

Grouping jobs into rounds, generally according to location, isn't anything new for many mobile businesses. What is new is being able to set a unique colour for each so that when viewed on a map or on a planner, it is very easy to spot when one or two jobs are out of sync so we'll talk about this first.

In the rounds section > press into a round > three dots menu to the top right > pick round colour > save

One you have done this on all rounds, then you'll notice that the jobs show on the planners with these colours making it easy to see which rounds are scheduled on which days.

To further improve efficiency by location, use the visual planner on the ultimate plan to then see all rounds plotted on a map (like the image shown on the laptop view) where you can quickly draw round a selection and move them to a more logical round.