Quote accepted to crew scheduled, same hour
The gap between a customer saying yes and a crew being booked is where field service jobs die.
What goes wrong today
A quote gets accepted on Friday afternoon. The office is closed. On Monday it is one of forty emails, and the crew calendar for that week is already full. The customer waits eleven days for work they already agreed to.
What starts it
- Your quoting tool — A quote or estimate status changes to acceptedDescribed rather than named: we have not verified what this vendor calls the event, and inventing a name would waste your afternoon.
- Email — The customer clicks the accept link in the emailed quoteDescribed rather than named: we have not verified what this vendor calls the event, and inventing a name would waste your afternoon.
How it runs
- 1Quote accepted
The status change is picked up within a minute, at any hour.
- 2Read the job
Pull the line items and work out the crew size and hours the quote assumed.
- 3Find the slot
Search the crew calendar for the first window that fits, respecting travel between the day's other jobs.
- 4Hold, do not book
The window is held as provisional. Nothing tells the customer a date yet.
- 5Scheduler confirms
A person looks at the held slot with the whole week in front of them and confirms, moves, or splits it.
a person does this - 6Customer told
Only after a person confirms does the date go out.
What a person still does
None of this runs unattended. If it did, we would be selling you something else.
- Confirms every held slot. The calendar does not know that Tuesday's crew is one person short.
- Splits jobs that will not fit in one visit.
- Handles anything where the accepted quote differs from what was discussed on site.
Skip this if…
- Your crews are booked more than three weeks out. Then the bottleneck is capacity, and scheduling faster just moves the queue.
- Quotes are accepted by phone rather than in a system. There is no event to listen for.
- Every job needs a site visit before it can be scheduled. Automate the site visit booking instead.
Build it yourself
Roughly two to three weeks. The calendar search is the hard part, not the trigger.
Download the build checklistWant this one built for your setup?
Tell us what you already run and we will tell you honestly whether this is worth building for you — including when the answer is no, which is what the skip list above is for.