The seven first-run steps, in order - roster, territory, customers, worklists, customer messages, permissions and the technician app.
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The seven first-run steps, in order - roster, territory, customers, worklists, customer messages, permissions and the technician app.
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Roughly fifteen minutes for a typical shop. Do these in order.
Dispatch, then Settings. Turn on each person who goes out on jobs, and set their working days and hours. The board shades the time they are off.
Every technician is a real CRM user with their own login - My Day, photo uploads and location consent all require one. Adding a user does not automatically put them on the roster: the login is what lets someone sign in, the roster is what decides whether work can be assigned to them.
On the same page, set your shop's latitude and longitude and a service radius in miles. There is no address lookup here, so right-click your shop in Google Maps to copy the two numbers.
This powers drive-time slot suggestions and the out-of-territory notice when booking. That notice is a heads-up rather than a block, and it only fires on a property that already has map coordinates.
If your contacts carry both a street address and a city, this card creates service locations from them. Click it again until the counter reads zero, then use the geocode button beside it until that count reaches zero too.
This only ever looks at your oldest 1,000 contacts, and the window does not move. Above about a thousand contacts the counter reaches zero while your newest customers still have no service location. Check a recent customer before you trust it. Adding locations by hand, or from the job booking screen, works normally.
If you are switching from another system, import your contacts with the CRM's own importer first.
Optional but recommended. Worklists live on their own tab rather than in Settings. Build a reusable list - "Spring tune-up", "Move-out clean" - add items, drag to reorder, and flip an item's Required switch.
Required items block a technician from finishing a job until they are done. The office can still finish anyway from the board, and that override is logged along with the work that was skipped.
Back on the dispatch Settings page, open the Customer tab and its Notifications section. Dispatch can text or email your customer as their visit moves along: visit scheduled, visit rescheduled, technician on the way, visit complete, visit cancelled.
Check each event's email and text setting before relying on it. The screenshot shows a sample account with some text channels already on. The on-the-way message carries the live tracking link, so leaving that event off means your customer has no way to reach the tracking page through a Dispatch message.
Below the events, Reminders adds up to three heads-up messages before a visit. A message that comes due inside your quiet hours waits until they end. The on-the-way message is exempt, because holding "I am on my way" makes it a lie.
Applying a trade preset on this page replaces this whole list, events and reminders alike, with the preset's own choices. If you apply one, come back and check this card afterwards.
Dispatch adds three permission modules: Jobs, Dispatch Board and Technicians.
| Role | Give them |
|---|---|
| Office staff | Jobs + Dispatch Board + Technicians |
| Field technician | Technicians, plus Jobs read if they should open job pages, plus the CRM's Files permission for photo uploads |
Every dispatch role needs the Technicians key, office roles included. The sidebar row and the Dispatch landing page are both gated on that one key, so a role without it has no Dispatch row at all.
Know what Jobs read opens before you grant it. It is also the key the dispatch Settings page is gated on, so anyone holding it can read your whole operator configuration: the staff table with every person's name and email, each technician's working hours, your billing rhythm, the finish rules, and which customer messages you send. Reading is all it gives them, since every save on that page needs an update key.
Roster and movement administration - editing the roster, working hours, smart-schedule settings and location history - takes the Dispatch Board key. The Technicians key alone covers a technician's own work, never other people's roster rows or movement trails.
Each technician signs in on their phone, opens My Day, and adds it to their home screen. Location sharing is theirs to grant on that screen, and they can stop it at any time.