Table of Contents
Overview
Setting up your snow removal jobs can be tricky, how can you create a schedule when you don't know when it's going to snow? We've come up with a workflow for snow removal that allows you to dispatch your team when the snow falls. This workflow can also be used for other industries where you need to schedule visits as needed as part of a contract or based on tags.
Set up recurring jobs for snow removal
First, you will need to create a Recurring Job for each property that you will be doing snow removal for this season. Set the job to have a duration that will cover the entire snow season. When in doubt make the duration longer than you think it might need to be.
For the repeat dropdown, select “As needed - we won’t prompt you”. This allows you to book visits for this recurring job as you need to, which in this case will be when the snow falls.
You can think of the job as the contract to do the work, and the visits as the individual days when you or your team are doing the service.
Add a job titles and instructions
On the job, you can enter in a job title. You can use titles to differentiate types of jobs. For example, you can include the area of the city the property is in, or the level of snow in the job description. Later, when you are making visits, you can filter for jobs by titles and make visits for just those groups of jobs.
Set up your invoicing
Fixed Price Billing - The client is invoiced the same amount per billing period, no matter how many visits you do. Eg. $1000.00 per month, regardless of how many visits are done.
Visit Based Billing Jobs - The client is invoiced based on the number of visits that are completed. Eg. 5 visits are done, and the price is $50.00 per visit. The client is invoiced $250.00.
Add line items
On the job, you can add line items. These can also be used to differentiate types of job. Later you can search for jobs with a specific line item to make visits for just these jobs.
If you charge a client different rates depending on the amount of snow, you’ll want to make a job for each amount of snow. For example, if you charge one rate for under 6 inches of snow, and another rate for over 6 inches of snow, you would make 2 jobs. One job with the line item for under 6 inches, and one with the line item for over 6 inches. When you scheduling visits for this client, you can then select which job they fall under.
Tag your clients
You can also add Tags to your clients, then later create visits based off the tags. A common workflow is to tag clients by zones or areas of the city. For example, you can tag all clients in the “north” side of the city with a tag called “north”, or you can split your service up into different zones and tag your clients as “zone a”, “zone b”, “zone c”, and so on. This will allow you to quickly create visits for whichever area you need.
Create new visits
After you have set up your jobs, you can make visits for them when it snows. To schedule visits, go to any calendar view and click More Actions > Visits.
Once on the New Visits page, you can filter for jobs based on what is in the Job Description, Line Items on the job, and what the client is Tagged with. You can also filter by if there are 'incomplete' visits in the future.
On the left, all the jobs that match you filter settings will show up. Click All to select all the jobs. You can also click on individual jobs on the left to select them, if you need.
Note: 500 jobs at once will appear on the map, however there is a limit of 100 jobs that can have visits generated for them at a time using this method. If you have more than 100 jobs that you need to create visits for, create the visits in batches by narrowing down the number of jobs by using the filters.
Then click Next in the top right. You can then assign the users to these visits and finish making the visits by clicking Let's make some visits! The newly created visits will then appear on the calendar.
At the end of the season, the jobs will automatically close when they get to the end of their duration.
If you have any questions about your specific workflow, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our Support Team.