CarpetBossPro Blog — Commercial & Property Managers

One Van on Homes, One on Commercial After Hours: Splitting the Dispatch Board

The moment a carpet company has two vans and a few commercial accounts, a pattern tends to appear on its own. One van runs homes during the day. The other runs offices, stores and common areas after hours. The question is how to keep both straight without the owner rebuilding the schedule every morning.

The Setup Most Growing Companies Land On

The case for running both kinds of work together is covered in Commercial and Residential Carpet Jobs on One Schedule. This guide gets practical about the dispatch board itself.

Splitting vans by type of work makes sense for a few reasons. Commercial work happens when buildings are empty, which is when homeowners do not want you. Night techs get used to building access, security desks and large open spaces; day techs get used to homeowners, furniture and upselling a sofa. Each van carries what its route needs. And the routes themselves stay simpler, because each one has one kind of stop.

Filter the Board by Van

The CarpetBossPro dispatch board (the Scheduled List) shows jobs by day and filters by van. Set up each van, assign employees to vans, and the board can show just the day van's jobs or just the night van's jobs. Save each of those as a view, and the office can switch between “Day Van” and “Night Van” in a click.

Saved views also help when the owner covers a route. Pull up the night view, see the stops, and know exactly what the evening looks like.

Filling Each Van From the Waiting List

Both vans fill from the same Waiting List. The office looks at the map, picks the residential customers due in one area for the day van, and the commercial addresses due in another area for the night van. Pins are colored not due yet, due now and overdue past a 7-day grace, so overdue commercial accounts stand out and go first.

New requests show on the same list. A homeowner request goes to the day van. A leasing office's move-out request can go to whichever van fits: day if the unit is empty and the complex allows it, night if that is the only open slot.

Route Order for Each Van

Each van's route can be ordered by hand or auto-routed from the shop:

• Closest First starts near the shop and works outward. Good for a day van heading out in the morning.
• Furthest First starts at the far end and works back toward the shop. Good for a night van that wants to finish close to home.

Night routes sometimes need a hand-set order regardless of distance, because one building closes earlier or one security desk wants you in before 9. Set those by hand and the tech's phone shows the same order as the board.

Printed Route Sheets

Some techs like paper on the dashboard, especially on a night route through several buildings. Print the route sheet for each van from the board. The sheet and the phone show the same stops in the same order, so nobody is working from an old list.

On the Tech's Phone

Each tech logs into the tech app with your company login and a personal PIN and sees their own jobs in route order. Day techs see homeowners with room lists, add-ons and access notes like pets and gate codes. Night techs see suites with square feet, method and building access. Both see navigation, the carpet checklist, before-and-after photos and Start / Skip / Complete. Homeowners get automatic on-the-way and arrived texts based on their alert choices. Both techs use the time clock.

Crew GPS puts both vans on the office map, so the owner can see where the day van is in the afternoon and where the night van is in the evening.

When One Van Is Not Enough

As commercial work grows, the night van fills up. The board will show it: every night packed, overdue commercial pins on the Waiting List. That is the signal to add a second night route or move some commercial work to the day van during off-hours like weekend mornings. Because every van uses the same board, adding one is a matter of setting up the van, assigning a tech and filtering a new view.

The reverse works too. In a slow residential month, the day van can pick up commercial stops that allow daytime work, such as empty apartment units or a school during break.

A Board Anyone Can Run

Splitting the board by van means anyone in the office can see what each crew is doing without asking the owner. The night tech knows their route before they leave, and the day tech never gets an office suite on their list by mistake. For tracking the night van once it is out, see Crew GPS and the Time Clock on Night Office Carpet Routes. For the rest of the commercial tools, visit the CarpetBossPro commercial carpet cleaning software page.