GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

Repair Van, Install Van: Splitting a Garage Door Fleet on the Dispatch Board

Once a garage door company has two vans, the question of who does what comes up fast. Splitting the work evenly sounds fair, but it tends to leave both vans half-booked with installs and constantly interrupted by spring calls. Many shops land on a different answer: give each van a job.

Two Kinds of Day

The urgent calls covered in Car Trapped in the Garage: Dispatching the Stuck-Door Call First are a big reason the split exists. A van that has to drop everything for a trapped car cannot also promise a homeowner it will be in their driveway at 8am for a full new-door install.

So the work gets sorted by its shape:

• The repair van runs short, unpredictable jobs: broken torsion and extension springs, cables, off-track doors, rollers, openers that will not close, photo-eye sensors, keypads and remotes. Its day is half booked in the morning and filled by the phone.
• The install van runs long, planned jobs: new doors, opener installs, panel or section replacements, plus yearly tune-ups and commercial maintenance to fill the gaps. Its day is planned days ahead and mostly stays put.

Setting Up the Split

In GarageDoorBossPro, employees are assigned to vans, and the dispatch board can be filtered by van. That is all the split really needs. Assign your repair tech to Van 1 and your installer to Van 2, and the board shows two separate routes. Each tech logs in to the tech app with the company login and a personal PIN and sees only their own day.

From there it is habit. Same-day calls go to Van 1. Approved estimates for new doors and openers become jobs on Van 2. Tune-ups and commercial maintenance pulled off the Waiting List map go to Van 2 on days without an install, or fill in around a half-day install.

Routing Each Van Differently

Because the two vans have different days, they route differently. The repair van usually auto-routes Closest First from the shop, clearing nearby calls early and staying central for whatever comes in next. The install van often has only two or three stops and gets ordered by hand around the install appointment. On a full tune-up day in one part of town, the install van might auto-route Furthest First, starting at the edge and working back toward the shop.

Routing options are explained in more detail in Auto-Routing Garage Door Calls: Closest First or Furthest First From the Shop.

Bending the Split When the Day Demands It

The split is a default, not a rule. A few common bends:

• The repair van is buried. On a cold morning with a stack of spring calls, the install van takes one or two on its way to the install, or right after it.
• The install finishes early. The installer has three hours left. Move a couple of repair calls or tune-ups near the install to Van 2.
• The install gets pushed. The door did not arrive, or the homeowner rescheduled. Van 2 becomes a tune-up van for the day, filled from the Waiting List map.

The rule of thumb many owners use: bend the split for an afternoon, not for a week. If the install van is taking repair calls every single day, the shop probably needs a second repair van or a different install calendar, not more bending. The board makes that easy to see, because a week of the install van's routes full of spring calls is hard to miss.

Each bend is just moving jobs between vans on the board. The jobs leave one tech's phone and appear on the other's, in route order, without a phone call.

Seeing Both at Once

Filtering by van keeps each route clean, but the office should also look at both together a couple of times a day. Crew GPS on the office map shows where each van actually is. Seeing the repair van across town with four calls left and the install van ten minutes from a new spring call makes the bend obvious.

Saved views help here. Save one view for the repair van today, one for the install van this week, and one for all vans today, and switch between them in a click.

The One-Van and Three-Van Versions

With one van, the split happens by time instead: mornings for installs, afternoons open for repairs, or the reverse. With three vans, a common setup is two repair vans splitting the service area and one install van, or one repair, one install and one on tune-ups and commercial maintenance. The board handles any of these the same way, because it is just jobs on vans and days.

For how the van split fits with the rest of dispatch, routing and the Waiting List, go back to the garage door scheduling software page.