GarageDoorBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

The Waiting List Map: Every Garage Door Visit That Came Due, on One Screen

Every garage door company has work that is waiting. Yearly tune-ups people signed up for. Commercial doors on a maintenance plan. The request that came in through the website on Sunday night. The trouble is that waiting work usually lives in several places at once: a spreadsheet, the office inbox, a calendar reminder, and somebody's memory. GarageDoorBossPro puts it all on one map.

Where the Gaps in the Schedule Come From

Filling the spare half of an install day is mentioned in Booking Install Days: Scheduling New Doors and Openers Without Wrecking the Repair Route. The Waiting List is where that filler work comes from.

It is a live map and a list of every visit that has come due, plus new requests that have not been scheduled yet. Whenever the office has a van with room, the Waiting List answers the question “what should we put there?”

How Visits Come Due

Recurring work is set by minimum days between visits. A yearly tune-up plan uses 365 days. A commercial door maintenance plan might use 90. When the last visit was completed, the clock starts, and when enough days have passed, the visit shows up on the Waiting List as due.

Nobody has to set a reminder or keep a list of who signed up last spring. The plan does the counting. The yearly side of this is covered in more detail in the next article in this series.

Reading the Pin Colors

Every pin on the map is colored by status:

• Not due yet. The visit is coming up but has not reached its minimum days. Good to know about when building a route nearby, but not urgent.
• Due now. The visit has reached its minimum days. It should go on a route soon.
• Overdue. The visit has passed a 7-day grace after coming due. These are the ones to grab first, because a customer who is paying for a yearly tune-up should not have to call to ask where it is.

New requests sit on the same map, so the office sees a fresh “opener runs but door won't move” request right next to the three tune-ups due on the same street.

Map and List Together

The map is for geography. The list is for detail. On the map, the office can see that the north side has a cluster of due tune-ups and the east side has two overdue commercial visits. On the list, the office can see each address, the service, and how long it has been waiting.

Most offices end up using both in the same sitting. The map tells them where to send a van. The list tells them which of those visits have been waiting longest and whether any of them need a particular tech, like a commercial sectional door that only the senior tech services. Clicking between the two is faster than any spreadsheet sort.

Because imported addresses are placed on the map automatically after a CSV import, even a company that just moved its customer list over sees its due work on the map from the start.

From Pin to Route

Scheduling from the Waiting List is a matter of picking pins and putting them on a day and a van. A typical flow:

• Look at the van's day on the dispatch board and see how much room it has.
• Open the Waiting List map and find a cluster of due or overdue pins in one area.
• Put those visits on the van for that day.
• Auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, then adjust by hand.

The visits leave the Waiting List and appear on the dispatch board and the tech's phone. Customers with night-before reminders turned on hear about it the evening before. For the full approach, see Filling a Garage Door Route by Area: Building Days From the Map.

Why It Matters for a Garage Door Company

Repair work fills itself. The phone rings. Recurring work does not ring. It waits quietly, and if nobody looks, it never happens. A tune-up plan that is sold but never scheduled is a refund request waiting to happen, or at least a customer who will not renew. The Waiting List makes waiting work as visible as the ringing phone.

Commercial accounts make this even more important. A property manager who signed up for door maintenance every 90 days on a row of townhome garages, or a business with dock doors, expects those visits to happen without a reminder call. Seeing those pins turn from due now to overdue is the office's early warning.

It also helps on slow days. When the repair van has an open afternoon, the Waiting List shows exactly which due tune-ups are near where the van already is. To see how the Waiting List fits with the dispatch board, routing and customer texts, go back to the garage door scheduling software page.