Schedule

The Schedule page is where bookings get a date, a technician and a vehicle. It remembers the layout you used last (board, lists or map, and day, week or month) in your browser.

Layouts

The three icons at the top left switch layout.

Layout	What you get
Board	Day, Week or Month, chosen with the buttons beside the date
Lists	Day, Unscheduled, Overdue, Needs review and All bookings, each as a table
Map	The day's stops, plus where technicians were in the last 12 hours

Use the arrows beside the date to step back and forward, the date field to jump, and Today to come back.

Day

One lane per technician, running along a time line, with a live line for the current time. Cards are coloured by work stream:

Colour	Work
Amber	Pump-outs
Teal	Servicing
Slate	Inspections
Clay	Repairs and installs (this includes breakdowns and commissioning)

The shape of the card shows dispatch state. Drafts have a dashed edge and cancelled bookings are struck through. A small round mark on a card shows field progress: dispatched, on the way, working, needs review, done, or flagged. The key under the board lists the colours, "Draft" and "Time aside".

Week

A crew board with a row per technician and a column per day. Click a day heading to open that day.

Month

A calendar of the month. Click a day to open it on the day board.

Lists

The Lists layout has five tabs:

• Day: everything on the chosen date.
• Unscheduled: open bookings with no date.
• Overdue: unfinished bookings whose window has passed. A booking with no window counts as overdue the day after its date.
• Needs review: work the technician has finished that the office hasn't approved.
• All bookings: everything, a page at a time.

Map

The map shows the day's stops in order. Stops without coordinates are listed as "No map point". Technician positions come from the field app and show the last position in the past 12 hours. The map tiles come from OpenStreetMap unless your installer has set another tile source.

Filters

The search box takes a job number, customer or address. The filter button opens three more: Technician (Everyone, Any assigned, Unassigned, or one person), Status (Any, Unfinished, or one status) and Work (a job type). "Clear filters" resets them.

Pending

The Pending panel beside the board lists bookings that have no date yet, so nothing waits unseen. It can be collapsed. When everything has a date it says so.

Put a booking on the board

Drag a card from Pending, or from one lane to another, and drop it on a technician in the day view or on a technician and day in the week view. A confirmation sheet opens ("Schedule booking") with Date, Start, Minutes, Technician and Vehicle filled in from where you dropped it. Change anything, then confirm. Nothing moves until you confirm.

You can also use "Schedule" on a pending card, or open a booking and choose "Schedule or move".

To change how long a booking runs, drag the handle at the end of its card on the day board. The new end time saves straight away.

A booking that's finished or waiting for review can't be dragged.

Drafts move to Scheduled on their own once they have both a date and a technician. A booking without a technician stays a draft.

Book a job

1. Choose "Book job".
2. Pick the customer, then the site. If the customer has one site it's chosen for you. A system is optional.
3. Choose the work type and priority (1 Emergency, 2 Urgent, 3 High, 5 Normal, 7 Low) and write the instructions for the technician.
4. Add a date, start time, minutes, technician and vehicle. Leave the date empty to keep the job in Pending.
5. Save.

A job saved without a date and technician is a draft. Breakdowns are urgent by default and tell the assigned technician when they're assigned.

Access and hazard notes from the site are copied onto the job so they stay with the booking even if the site record changes later.

Rebook

Open a booking and choose "Book another visit" (the plus icon). The new booking starts from the same customer, site and instructions, with dates and crew empty. Use it for a return visit after a failed or part-finished job.

To change an existing booking, open it and choose Edit.

Time aside

The clock icon next to Filters sets time aside for breaks, leave, meetings, training, travel or other. Choose a person or the whole team, give it a title and a start and end. Leave runs over whole days. Time aside shows on the boards so nobody gets booked into it. Click it on the board to change or remove it.

Recurring work

Repeating services such as a quarterly AWTS service are set up on the Recurring page. A plan makes draft visits that then appear in Pending.

1. Choose "New plan". Pick the site, an optional system, the work type, minutes and a title.
2. Set the pattern: Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Every few months. Monthly plans can run on a day of the month or on a weekday such as the first Tuesday.
3. Set when it starts and optionally ends, the start time, and the default technician and vehicle.
4. On the plan, choose Generate. Pick a date range and check the preview first. It marks each date as a new draft, already generated, or a conflict. Then create the drafts.

Pause stops a plan without losing it. Generated visits start as drafts with the plan's details.

You don't have to generate visits by hand. Early each morning, draft visits are raised for everything falling due in the next two weeks, and dispatch is told. Change how far ahead under Admin > Recurring work; pick at least as far as you plan your runs. They come from two places:

• Recurring plans, on the plan's dates.
• Service intervals on a system. A system with a next service date, or a last service date and an interval, gets a service visit. A system with a last pump-out date and a pump-out interval gets a pump-out.

A system that has an active plan for the same work is left to the plan, so it is not raised twice.

When a service or pump-out is finished, the system's last date becomes the day the work was done and its next service falls due one interval later. A quarterly service done on 16 November is next due on 14 February, and its draft visit appears two weeks before that. The next date counts from the day the last service was done, so a late service pushes the next one back.

A draft with no technician waits in Build runs. Moving a visit to another day does not make a second one.

Runs

The Runs page shows one technician's day as a run from their depot. Pick the person and date to see stops in order, the approximate distance and any hazards.

Building runs

"Build runs" on the Runs page takes the work that is waiting and groups it into runs of nearby stops. Waiting work is every booking with no date, the draft visits raised for recurring plans and service intervals that no technician has yet, and any stop left over from an earlier day. Nothing is saved until you schedule a run.

The settings above the map decide the grouping. Change them and choose "Group again":

• Stops per run: the most stops one run can hold.
• Day, hours: how long a run can be, counting the work and the driving from the depot and back.
• Stops within, km: a job joins a run only if it is this close to another stop in it. Clear it to allow any distance.
• Due within: how far ahead to take recurring work. A visit due later than this is left for another day.
• Work: group one kind of work only, such as pump-outs.
• Depot: shown when you have more than one. Runs are measured from this depot.

Grouping starts with the job farthest from the depot and adds its nearest neighbours until the run is full, so outlying work ends up together. Where the drive out and back is already longer than the day, the area is still kept as one run and marked "Over the day".

A stop is left over when it was booked on a run, the day has passed, and the technician never started it. Left-over stops go first: each run is started from one of them until none are waiting, so they sit in the first runs in the list, marked "Left over from" with the day they were booked for. A notice above the map gives the count, and dispatch is told each morning while any are waiting. They keep their old day and technician until you schedule the run they are in, so nothing is moved without you. A stop the technician started, or one that failed, is under Needs review on the Schedule instead.

Each recurring stop shows the day it falls due, and each run shows its earliest one, so you can pick a day that is not past what is owed. Scheduling a visit on another day does not change when it was due, and the next visit in the cycle still comes up on time.

The map shows every pending job with its run number. Click a run in the list, or one of its pins, to open it. The open run shows its stops in order with a line from the depot. For each stop you can:

• move it earlier or later with the arrows
• move it to another run, to a new run, or leave it pending. A stop moved to another run is placed where it adds the least driving.

To schedule the open run, pick the day, start time, technician and, if you want, a vehicle, then choose "Schedule run". Each stop gets that day and technician, and a time that follows the order, with driving time between stops. Drafts become scheduled. Under the button the page shows the drive from that technician's own depot, and warns if they already have work that day; the run then starts after their last job.

Grouping uses straight-line distances, so it stays quick with a long pending list. After scheduling, open the day in Runs and use Optimise for road distances. Grouping covers up to 600 pending jobs at a time. Jobs at sites with no map point can't be grouped and are listed under "No map point".

You need permission to dispatch or edit jobs to schedule a run.

Optimising a run

Choose "Optimise" under the stop list. Rangefront asks the route optimiser for a shorter order and shows it as a dashed line on the map. Nothing is saved until you choose "Apply order". "Discard" throws it away.

The proposal shows:

• the driving distance and time now and in the proposed order, and how much is saved, including the drive back to the depot
• the time each stop would be reached, with the old time beside it where it moves
• which distances were used. If your company has Google Routes, Mapbox or openrouteservice set up, the figures are road distances from that service. If not, or if it can't be reached, it falls back to straight-line distances and says so in a warning. Straight-line figures are shorter than real roads, so treat the savings as a guide.

Some stops don't move:

• Work already started or finished keeps its place.
• A job with a fixed time keeps its place and its time. Use the padlock beside a stop to fix or release it, for a customer who was promised a time. If the stops before a fixed job can't be finished in time, the proposal warns you with how many minutes late.

Applying re-times the stops that can move, in the new order, keeping each job's length. If someone changes the run while you are looking at a proposal, Rangefront refuses to apply it and asks you to optimise again. A proposal also lapses after 30 minutes. Applying the same proposal twice changes nothing the second time.

You need permission to dispatch or edit jobs, or to plan routes. Developers can read route optimisation for the providers and their settings.

"Dispatch" sends every scheduled job in the run to the technician at once. "Print run sheet" prints the day.

Personal calendars

Each person can see their jobs in their own calendar app. Open Admin > Calendar feed (or Settings in the field app), copy the link and subscribe:

• Outlook: Add calendar, Subscribe from web, paste the link.
• Google Calendar: Other calendars, From URL, paste the link.
• Apple Calendar: File, New Calendar Subscription, paste the link.

The feed shows the jobs the person leads or crews, 30 days back and 90 ahead. A job with a crew appears on every crew member's calendar. Anyone with the link can read it, so keep it private. "Reset link" replaces it. Calendar apps check for changes every few hours. See integrations.

Next

• Jobs for what happens after a booking is dispatched.
• Online bookings for requests that arrive from your website.