CarpetBossPro Blog — Carpet Cleaning Software

Dispatch for Carpet Cleaners: Days, Vans and Route Order on One Board

Carpet cleaning jobs are long. A whole house with stairs can take a good part of the morning, and a truck-mount van does not zip across town between stops. That makes the order of the day matter more than it does in many trades. Dispatch is where the office decides which van goes where, and in what order.

Where the Jobs Come From

Most of the jobs on the board start as repeat customers who came due, set up as described in Yearly and Six-Month Cleanings: Setting Up Repeat Carpet Customers by Minimum Days. Others come from approved estimates and new requests. Wherever they come from, they land in the same place: the Scheduled List, or dispatch board.

Jobs by Day, Filtered by Van

The dispatch board shows jobs by day. Filter it by van, and you see one van's day: the jobs, their addresses, and what each job includes. Filter it to all vans, and you see the whole company's day at once.

Because every job carries its carpet job details, the office can see at a glance which jobs are big. A day with two whole-house cleanings and an upholstery job is full. A day with five two-room jobs in one neighborhood might have room for one more. That is much harder to judge from a list of addresses alone.

Route Order: Auto or By Hand

Once a van's jobs are on a day, they need an order. CarpetBossPro can auto-route a van's day Closest First or Furthest First from the shop:

• Closest First starts near the shop and works outward. Good when the first job needs an early start, or when the van wants to end the day far from the shop near the tech's home.
• Furthest First drives out to the far end and works back toward the shop. Good when the van needs to finish near the shop to dump waste water and restock.

You can also set the route order by hand. Carpet cleaning has plenty of reasons to: a customer who can only be home in the afternoon, an office that has to be done after closing, a move-out that needs to be finished before a walk-through.

Whatever order the board shows is the order the tech sees on their phone.

Saved Views and Route Sheets

Offices tend to look at the board the same few ways every day: today for all vans, tomorrow for the residential van, this week for the commercial van. Saved views keep those one click away.

Route sheets can be printed from the board. Some techs like a printed sheet in the van, especially in the first weeks on new software, and some commercial clients want a printed list of what is being done tonight. The tech app has everything on the sheet and more, but the option is there.

A Typical Carpet Company Setup

Many carpet companies with two vans split them like this: one van on residential jobs during the day, and one on commercial carpet after hours. The residential van runs whole houses, upholstery and move-outs in daylight when homeowners are home. The commercial van does office maintenance and common areas in the evening when the building is empty.

Filter by van and each one gets its own clean day. The office plans residential by area from the Waiting List and plans commercial by the buildings' own schedules. The residential and commercial split is covered more in Residential and Commercial Carpet Work in the Same Software.

Leave Room for the Phone

Carpet cleaning has emergencies of its own: a spilled glass of red wine before a party, a pet accident the day before guests arrive, a landlord who needs a unit cleaned before a new tenant moves in on Friday. Those calls pay well and earn loyalty, but only if there is somewhere to put them.

A simple habit helps. When filling days from the Waiting List, leave a gap in the afternoon on one van a few days a week. If nothing urgent comes in, pull an overdue repeat customer from the map to fill it. If something does, the gap is ready and the rest of the route does not have to move.

During the Day

Dispatch does not stop when the vans leave. As techs tap Start and Complete on their phones, the office sees jobs underway and finished. Skipped jobs show the tech's reason. Crew GPS shows on the office map, so when a customer calls asking where the van is, the office can answer. If a job runs long, the office can move the last stop to another day and text the customer.

Customers also see the route. In the customer app they can watch today's route on a live map — “You're stop 12 of 20 — the crew is 5 stops away” — and they get automatic on-the-way and arrived texts. Fewer calls to the office asking “when are you coming?” is one of the quiet benefits of good dispatch.

To see how dispatch connects to the Waiting List, the tech app and billing, return to the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning software page.