Drywall or multi visit scheduling

Home Remodeling company here. 

I relate to the difficulty of scheduling visits. For us, we find that we can't accurately estimate the time it takes to complete certain jobs. This is partly because our services are widespread, and because of the roadblocks often seen in construction.

Currently, our method to counteract this is to make all current jobs constantly active (i.e. one visit per job is scheduled for a month long.) That way, our employees will always be able to clock in, and we don't have to manually shift the schedule around every time we hit a roadblock.

I know there has to be a more effective method though, especially when considering scaling the business. If anyone has advice, please let us know!

Hey Tyler,

That sounds like an alright solution for larger jobs.. not ideal but like you say at least its there for the guys to hit the timer. 

Thanks for keeping this conversation going!!

I’ve been scheduling them as tasks when we have a job that carries over to another visit. For example, with painting, we didn’t get to put a second coat on, so we schedule a task the next available time for someone on the team to go back and complete the painting. It doesn’t allow time tracking, but it’s the best way I have found to do it.

Hi,

We do everything in "day" view on the schedule. First I always make sure each active job has an active visit. From there I just make a new visit for each day we'll be on a job (I'll guesstimate) and tag each employee to the visits each day and make sure they cover the time frame I want them to be there each day which is usually 9am to 4pm give or take for full day jobs. Let's say I'm pretty sure it will need 5 days but might carry over to a 6th day, then on that 6th day I'll make a task with the customer's name/city/brief description and tag it to the lead person in the 9am - 10am slot so I know I might need more time. Sometimes I'll even make it a full day and into the next day too temporarily. Then I'll make a new actual visit if we do need to carry over. The title of the task might be something like "Smith/San Diego/Finish Paint Possible". 

Hope that helps!

Hi Fotos and welcome to the community!

What industry are you in? That might be helpful context for other members to share tips! The Jobber Success Team is also happy to discuss your workflow and provide some tips and tricks to get things running as smooth as possible! 

When estimating jobs and creating quotes we base that on hours needed, whether multi day or single. Drywall for example is 3 visits. When an estimate is accepted, we write in the notes of quote a “job summary form” where it’s a template with how many days, hours each visit, who to assign, etc. our scheduler then uses that form to create the visits in jobber after converting. Switching views on schedule from day to week helps but it’s not great with how it looks on screen.