GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Commercial Doors

Mixing Commercial and Residential Garage Door Work on One Schedule

Very few garage door companies run a commercial division with its own office, its own vans and its own software. Most have a few vans, a few techs and a mix of work: broken springs at houses, opener installs, yearly tune-ups, and a growing list of commercial accounts. All of it has to fit on the same calendar, with the same people.

One System, Two Kinds of Work

Getting manager approval on commercial work is covered in Getting a Property Manager to Say Yes: Online Estimate Approval and Follow-Ups. Once that work is approved, it goes on the same schedule as everything else.

In GarageDoorBossPro, commercial and residential work share one Waiting List, one dispatch board and one tech app. A 90-day warehouse maintenance visit and a 365-day residential tune-up both come due on the same map. A dock door repair and a house spring replacement both land on the same board. The tech sees both on their phone in route order.

What's Different, What's the Same

The differences between commercial and residential work are in the records, not the schedule:

• Clients. Commercial clients often have many addresses. Residential clients usually have one.
• Doors. Commercial addresses can have many doors labeled by bay or dock. A house usually has one or two.
• Billing. Commercial clients are often set to Monthly. Residential clients usually pay when the job is done.
• Access. Commercial addresses have check-in rules and site contacts. Houses have gate codes and dogs.

On the schedule, though, a job is a job. It has an address, a day, a van and a place in the route.

Splitting Work Between Vans

A common setup is one van on repairs and emergency spring calls, and one on installs, tune-ups and maintenance. Commercial maintenance visits usually go to the second van, since they are planned ahead. Commercial repair calls go to the first van, alongside residential repairs. The dispatch board filters by van, so the office can look at each van's day on its own.

For more on deciding which van gets which commercial job, see Dispatching Commercial Door Work: Which Van Goes to the Warehouse.

Routing Around Commercial Hours

Commercial stops often have time preferences. A warehouse wants the tech after the morning trucks. A shop wants work done before opening. A storage facility office closes at five. Access notes on the address carry those preferences, and the office can set the route order by hand when timing matters.

For the rest of the day, auto-route orders jobs Closest First or Furthest First from the shop. A typical day might start with a commercial maintenance visit at 7am before a shop opens, then work through residential tune-ups, then end with a warehouse in the afternoon once the dock is quiet.

Saved Views for Each Kind of Work

Saved views on the dispatch board let the office switch between pictures of the schedule quickly. Some owners keep a view for commercial work only, to make sure nothing is slipping on their biggest accounts. Others keep one per van. Tags on clients help here too: tag commercial clients and filter by the tag in reports to see how much of the business they make up.

Residential Work From Commercial Accounts

Commercial accounts bring residential work with them. The shop owner has a house with a garage door. The property manager manages rental houses as well as commercial space. The HOA's residents need opener repairs. Keeping everything in one system means a residential customer who came from a commercial account is already on the map, already has their door saved and already gets the same texts and invoices as everyone else.

The customer app works the same for both. Residential customers see today's route and where they are in line, request service, sign up for a tune-up plan and pay invoices. Commercial clients see their invoices, pay online and request service the same way.

Busy Seasons

Residential repair calls tend to come in waves, and commercial maintenance doesn't stop for them. When the repair van is buried, the Waiting List shows which commercial visits can slide a few days without going overdue and which ones can't. The office can move a not-yet-urgent maintenance visit to later in the week, keep the overdue ones on schedule, and still get the broken springs fixed. Seeing both kinds of work on one board is what makes that call possible.

One Schedule, Fewer Mistakes

Running commercial work on a separate calendar or a separate spreadsheet is how double bookings happen and maintenance visits get forgotten. One schedule for everything means the office sees every van's full day, and techs see every job in order on one phone.

For how commercial work fits into the rest of GarageDoorBossPro, go back to the commercial garage door software page.