GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Commercial Doors

The Waiting List for Commercial Accounts: Seeing Every Door Visit That Is Due

Once a door company has a handful of commercial accounts on maintenance plans, the hard part isn't doing the visits. It is knowing which ones are due, which ones are late and which ones are close enough to each other to do on the same day. A spreadsheet can tell you some of that. A map tells you all of it at a glance.

Where the Visits Come From

Setting up the plans themselves is covered in Commercial Door Maintenance Every 90 Days: Recurring Visits That Come Due on Their Own. Once a plan is set, its visits land on the Waiting List.

In GarageDoorBossPro, the Waiting List is a live map and list of every visit that came due, plus new requests that haven't been scheduled yet. Commercial maintenance, residential yearly tune-ups and new service requests from the website form or the customer app all show up in the same place. Nothing that needs scheduling hides in an inbox.

Reading the Colors

Every pin is colored by where the visit stands:

• Not due yet. The minimum days between visits haven't passed. Good for planning ahead.
• Due now. Ready to be scheduled.
• Overdue. Past a 7-day grace after coming due. These need attention first.

For commercial accounts, overdue pins are the ones that cost relationships. A facility manager who signed up for visits every 90 days notices when one is late. Seeing those pins in a different color makes it hard to forget them.

Clusters on the Map

Commercial work tends to group up. Warehouses sit in industrial parks. Townhome units sit side by side. A property manager's rentals are often in the same few neighborhoods. On the Waiting List map, those visits show as clusters of pins.

A cluster is a route day waiting to happen. When three warehouses in the same park are due in the same week, the office can put all three on one van on one day. When half a townhome community is due, the tech can walk from unit to unit. The map makes those groupings obvious in a way a list of addresses doesn't.

From the Waiting List to the Board

The office picks visits from the Waiting List and assigns them to a van and a day. They move onto the Scheduled List and dispatch board, which shows jobs by day and filters by van. From there, auto-route sets the order Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, or the office sets the route order by hand. Route sheets can be printed for any van.

The tech's phone shows the same order as the board. When the office moves a job, the tech's list follows. For how the office decides which van gets commercial work, see Dispatching Commercial Door Work: Which Van Goes to the Warehouse.

Mixing In New Requests

The Waiting List isn't only maintenance. New requests from the website form, the customer app or a phone call show up there too. A property manager who submits a request for a door that won't close at one of their rentals shows as a new pin. If a maintenance visit at a nearby building is due the same week, the office can put both on the same day.

Emergency calls usually skip the Waiting List and go straight to the board, since they need a van now. Everything else goes through the map.

Planning a Week Ahead

Pins marked not due yet are useful for planning. If a large warehouse account is coming due next week and a storage facility nearby the week after, the office can see both and decide whether to do them together. If several big commercial visits are bunching up in the same week, the office can pull one forward so a single van isn't buried.

Saved views on the dispatch board help too. An owner might keep one view for commercial work only and one for everything, and switch between them while planning.

Residential Pins on the Same Map

Commercial pins don't sit on a separate map. Yearly residential tune-ups come due right alongside them, and that is useful. A tune-up at a house two streets from a warehouse due the same week can ride on the same van. Over a season, filling the gaps around commercial stops with nearby residential work keeps drive time down and vans full.

The list view next to the map helps when the office wants to work through visits in order rather than by area. Schedule what is overdue first, then go back to the map to fill in the rest of each van's day with nearby pins.

Nothing Falls Through

The value of the Waiting List is simple: every visit that should happen is visible, every late one stands out, and grouping visits by area is a matter of looking at the map. For commercial accounts that pay for regular service, that is the difference between keeping the account and losing it to someone who shows up on time.

For the rest of the commercial setup, return to the commercial garage door software page.