ElectricalBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Electrician Scheduling Software: The Complete Guide to Scheduling and Dispatching an Electrical Service Company

Scheduling an electrical company is harder than it looks from the outside. A plumber or a lawn crew can often guess how long a stop will take. An electrician can walk into a “one dead outlet” call and find a problem that takes the rest of the morning, or walk into a panel upgrade that goes smoother than planned and finish early. The schedule has to bend all day without breaking.

This guide walks through how scheduling and dispatch work in ElectricalBossPro from the first phone call to the last stop of the day. Each section points to a deeper guide in this series.

Where Scheduling Fits

Scheduling is the middle of the business. Work comes in from the phone, the website request form, the customer app, an approved estimate or a recurring plan that came due. Work goes out as completed jobs, invoices and paid cards. The schedule decides how much of the first turns into the second each day. For the overview of how scheduling connects to everything else, start on the electrician scheduling software page.

In ElectricalBossPro the schedule lives in three places that always agree: the dispatch board in the office, the tech app on each phone, and the customer app where homeowners see their place on today's route. Change one, and the other two follow.

The Dispatch Board

The dispatch board, called the Scheduled List, shows every job by day. Filter it to a single van and you see that van's route. Clear the filter and you see the whole company. From the board you can:

• Assign a job to a van and a day
• Auto-route a van Closest First or Furthest First from the shop
• Set the route order by hand
• Save the views you check every morning
• Print a route sheet for each van
• Move a job to another day or another van

The next guide, The Electrical Dispatch Board: Every Job by Day and by Van, covers the board in detail.

Routing Each Van

Once a van has its jobs for the day, the order matters. Auto-routing puts the stops in a sensible driving order with one click. Closest First starts near the shop and works outward. Furthest First drives to the far end of the territory first and works back toward the shop, so the tech ends the day close to home.

Auto-routing is a starting point, not a rule. A customer who has to leave by 10, an install that needs to start first thing, or a commercial account that can only be worked before opening all call for moving a stop by hand. The office sets the order, and the tech app shows the same order on the tech's phone.

Service Calls, Installs and the Two-Van Setup

Electrical work comes in two very different sizes. Service calls and repairs are short and many: outlets, GFCIs, breakers, fixtures, ceiling fans, troubleshooting. Installs are long and few: panel upgrades, EV chargers, whole-house generators, dedicated circuits, rewires. Putting both on one route is how a panel upgrade ends up pushing four service calls to tomorrow.

A typical setup in ElectricalBossPro is one van on service calls and another on installs, inspections and generators. Each van is routed on its own, and the install van's day can be blocked out for one big job without touching the service route. Shops with one van can do the same thing by day instead of by van: service days and install days.

Same-Day and Emergency Calls

The phone does not wait for tomorrow's schedule. A breaker that will not reset, half the house dark, a kitchen with no power the day before a holiday. When an urgent call comes in, the office needs to know which van can get there, and it needs to fit the stop in without losing track of the rest of the route.

Crew GPS on the office map shows where every van is. The office adds the job to the closest van for today, moves it to the right place in the route order, and the tech's phone updates. Customers further down that route can still get their on-the-way text when the tech is actually headed to them.

The Waiting List: Recurring Work That Comes Due

Recurring work is where most electrical shops lose money quietly. A customer signs up for a yearly safety inspection or yearly generator maintenance, and a year later nobody remembers to call. ElectricalBossPro sets each recurring visit by minimum days between visits: 365 for yearly inspections and generator maintenance, 14 or 30 for commercial lighting maintenance and relamping.

When a visit comes due, it shows on the Waiting List, a live map and list of everything due. Pins are colored by status: not due yet, due now, and overdue once it is past a 7-day grace. The office picks a cluster of due visits in one part of town, assigns them to a van and a day, and routes them. The visit leaves the Waiting List and comes back on its own the next time it is due.

Booking Install Days

Installs usually start as estimates. The customer approves the estimate online, and the approved estimate becomes the scheduled job with its line items and any equipment details already filled in. The office books it on the install van's day and lets the homeowner know what to expect, including that the power may be off for part of the day. Service calls keep flowing on the other van.

The Customer Side of the Schedule

Electrical work happens inside the house, so somebody has to be home. Customers choose their alerts: a reminder the night before, a text when they are next, and a text when the tech arrives. The tech app sends on-the-way and arrived texts automatically as the tech works the route. In the customer app, homeowners see today's route on a live map, such as “You're stop 12 of 20 — the crew is 5 stops away.” Replies come back to the office through two-way texting.

When the Day Changes

Days change. A tech taps Skip because nobody was home, a storm knocks out power across a neighborhood and the phone lights up, or a commercial client asks for the work to move after closing. Skipped jobs come back to the office with the tech's note, ready to be moved to another day. Rescheduling a job is a matter of picking a new day or van on the board. Busy days get handled the same way every day gets handled, just with more same-day adds.

Getting Started

The fastest way to see how this works is the live demo, a fully stocked sample electrical company you can click around with no signup. The rest of this series covers each piece in detail, from routing to rescheduling to after-hours commercial work. For the full list of guides and the plan details, head back to the ElectricalBossPro scheduling and dispatch page.