Estimated Time or Duration of Jobs

Question

How are others scheduling jobs without any duration or estimated time fields in Jobber? When creating a new job, it simply prompts us to put in the exact day and time of the job we are creating.. as if we have our entire calendar and routes memorized and can just rattle it off. So we have to mark the job as unscheduled. But when that happens, Jobber assumes all unscheduled jobs are one hour. There is no field for us to input HOW LONG the job is going to take.. thus all unscheduled jobs in history.. are one hour. $50,000 paver job? 1 hour. 1,500sq ft lawn mow? 1 hour. It seems the logical thing would be during the create a job flow, to have a field where we could put in the estimated time it’s going to take. Then Jobber knows our calendar and can say… hey.. these are some times i found that seem to work. Or if it’s unscheduled.. at least when we go to schedule it.. Jobber’s ‘find a time’ tool.. would be able to work off the actual time it’s suppose to take.

So I’m asking.. how are ya’ll handling this now? I assume most of us estimate based off how long a job will take as a the main factor… but that doesn’t really transfer to jobber well. Are you writing estimated times in the description and then having your office manually adjust and mess with each visit individually each time a job is scheduled? Is there another way? Are you just scheduling all jobs for 2am on a Sunday and then manually dragging them to your 10-12 routes that week?

Really looking forward any insight into this as I don’t think Jobber is going to add time as a factor for jobs anytime soon. If we did it manually and had to falsely schedule all jobs for some random time before they were moved to a correct position on the schedule.. we’d then have to turn off all our clients upcoming visits views in the portal.

servicehomepro · Answer

This is one of the most overlooked gaps in Jobber, and you've described it perfectly. Most people just live with it, but it's actually solvable without waiting on Jobber to build a native duration field. The short version: duration doesn't have to live inside Jobber to work with Jobber. You can build a layer around it that tracks estimated time per job type, feeds that into how jobs get placed on the schedule, and stops your unscheduled jobs from defaulting to a meaningless 1 hour. Once that's in place, your office isn't manually dragging jobs around or guessing anymore. The schedule actually reflects real job length.

I've worked through this exact problem before, and the fix is less complicated than most people assume once you see how the pieces connect. Not going to lay out the whole system here since it really depends on how your team quotes and routes jobs, but if you want to compare notes on your setup, happy to talk through it.

How many job types are you typically juggling? Is it a handful of standard services, or does almost every job need its own custom estimate? ProperGuy

Forum Discussion

Estimated Time or Duration of Jobs

1 Reply