Dispatching

Dispatching is assigning today's work to a person and a time, then changing the plan when a job runs long or an emergency jumps the line. A dispatcher, or an owner playing dispatcher from the truck, decides who rolls where. The skill is local knowledge: who is closest, who has the part, who can handle an angry no-cool call before lunch.

Software for dispatch shows a board of techs and jobs and lets you move them. That board is worth it when more than one crew is in the field and the owner can no longer hold the day in their head. It is overhead when a single owner-operator is the whole company. The board would have one name on it. The failure mode for that company is not a bad route. It is a lead that never got a reply.

Puffly does not dispatch trucks or build routes. It keeps the lead and the task. When a job is sold, the owner still decides who goes. Shops with several techs often already have a field-service tool for the board. The calls that never became jobs are the CRM's problem, and they should not be forced onto a dispatch screen that assumes the work is already sold.

If you are shopping for dispatch, ask who answers the phone while the board is being rearranged. A perfect schedule of today's sold jobs does nothing for the homeowner who called about tomorrow. Put that caller on a lead list with a source and a next step. Then dispatch the work you actually won.

The handoff between the two is a status: this lead became a job, this one is still an estimate. You do not need one login to do both, as long as a person owns the moment the lead turns into scheduled work and writes that down where the morning person will see it.