JunkBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

The Junk Dispatch Board: Every Job by Day and by Truck

The dispatch board is where a junk company's week actually lives. Requests are possibilities. Jobs on the board are promises: this truck, this day, this customer. If the board is right, the week goes fine. If it's wrong, somebody is standing in a driveway waiting for a truck that went somewhere else.

From the Routine to the Board

The evening habit of building tomorrow from the map is covered in How to Schedule a Junk Hauling Company Without a Whiteboard. This guide is about the board those jobs land on once they have a day and a truck.

In JunkBossPro the board is the Scheduled List. It shows booked jobs by day. Every job on it has already left the Waiting List, which means somebody decided when it happens and who does it.

Looking at a Day

Pick a day and you see everything booked for it across every truck. For a small company, that is the whole picture in one screen: the single items, the half loads, the cleanout, the estimate visits the owner is doing between jobs.

Each job shows the information you need to judge whether the day makes sense:

• The address and the customer.
• The load size, from Min Load up through Full Load and multi-load jobs.
• The item count and what's going, like “Hot tub on the back deck.”
• The haul-to stop: dump, transfer station, donation center or metal recycler.

That last pair matters more than people expect. A day with four quarter loads headed to the same transfer station is a very different day from four quarter loads where one is a fridge for the metal recycler and one is furniture for the donation center.

Filtering by Truck

Filter the board by truck and you see one crew's day. This is the view you use to route, to check whether a truck is overbooked, and to answer the question every owner gets at 7 a.m.: “What do we have today?”

Trucks are set up with their crews, so employees with truck assignments see the right jobs on their phones. When you move a job from Truck 2 to Truck 1, it leaves one crew's list and shows up on the other's.

Most two-truck companies keep a steady split: one truck on single items and small loads, one on cleanouts. The board makes that easy to hold to. That split gets its own guide in Two Trucks, Two Kinds of Day: Splitting Small Loads and Cleanouts in Junk Dispatch.

Reading the Board for Problems

A good dispatcher reads the board looking for trouble before the trucks leave. A few things to check every evening:

• Load totals. Add up the sizes on each truck. More than a full load before lunch means an unload has to fit in the morning.
• Big jobs at the wrong end of the day. A full-load cleanout first thing means the truck goes to the dump before it does anything else.
• Estimate visits with no nearby truck. If the owner is quoting across town, can a truck pick up a single item on the way?
• Gaps. A truck with three jobs and room to spare is a truck you could fill from the Waiting List.

Route Order Lives on the Board

The order of a truck's jobs is set on the board, either by auto-routing Closest First or Furthest First from the yard, or by hand. Whatever order you set is the order the crew sees on their phone. There is no second list to keep in sync.

That matters on busy days. If dispatch moves a stop to the top because the customer called and needs to leave early, the crew sees it move. Nobody has to call the truck and read off a new order.

Saved Views and Printed Sheets

If you look at the same slice of the board every morning, save it as a view. Truck 1 today, the owner's estimate visits this week, whatever you check most. Saved views are covered in their own guide.

Some crews still like a sheet of paper on the dash, especially a helper who doesn't have the app open. Print a route sheet for the truck straight from the board.

One Board for the Whole Company

The point of the board is that everyone looks at the same thing. The owner booking a job from a driveway, the office answering the phone, the crew lead checking the next stop — all of them see the same day. That's what the whiteboard was supposed to do, minus the marker. The next guide covers routing each truck's day. For more on dispatch, see the JunkBossPro junk removal scheduling software page.