JunkBossPro Blog — Crew App

The Junk Crew's Day in Route Order: Working the Job List Top to Bottom

A junk truck burns money every mile it drives empty or half full in the wrong direction. The order of the day matters more than almost anything else the crew does, and it should not depend on the driver squinting at a list of addresses and guessing which one is closest. The crew app takes that guess away.

Signed In, Then the List

Signing in is covered in Company Login Plus a Personal PIN: How Junk Crews Sign In to the App. The moment the PIN goes in, the first thing on the screen is that truck's jobs for today, in order.

Job one is at the top. Each card shows the address, the service, the load size and the items, so the crew can see the shape of the whole day at a glance: two single items in the morning, a half load before lunch, a garage cleanout in the afternoon.

Where the Order Comes From

The order on the phone is the order on the dispatch board in the office. Jobs start on the Waiting List, the live map and list of every request that is not booked yet. Whoever runs dispatch drags them onto a truck and a day, then sets the order one of two ways:

• By hand. Drag jobs up and down the list. Useful when a customer can only do 8am, or when you know the cleanout will eat the whole afternoon.
• Auto-route. Closest First or Furthest First from the yard. Closest First works out from the yard; Furthest First drives out to the far end and works back toward home, which is handy when the last load of the day goes to the dump near the yard.

Whatever the board ends up showing is exactly what the crew sees. There is no separate route sheet to print and hand out, though you can still print route sheets if a driver wants paper in the cab.

Working Top to Bottom

The crew's job is simple: work the list from top to bottom. Tap the first card, tap navigation, drive. At the house, read the card, tap Start, take the before photos, load the truck, take the after photos, tap Complete. Then the next card.

When a job is done, it shows as done and the next card in line is the one to open. The crew always knows where they are in the day without counting addresses on a sheet.

Fitting the Dump Into the Route

Junk routes have a stop that never shows up on a customer list: the dump. Each job names where its load is hauled to, whether that is the dump, a transfer station, a donation center or a metal recycler, and the Go button heads there when the truck is ready to unload.

A morning of single items might all fit in the truck until lunch. A full-load cleanout might need its own dump run before the next job. The crew decides when to go based on how full the truck is and what is next on the list. The guide Dump Runs Mid-Route: When the Truck Fills Before the Day Is Done goes deeper on planning around it.

When the Office Changes the Plan

Junk days change. A customer calls at 9:30 with a same-day mattress pickup two streets from stop three. A cleanout customer cancels. A hot tub turns out to need a second truck.

When dispatch moves a job on the board, the crew's list follows. The new mattress pickup appears in its spot. The cancelled cleanout disappears. Nobody has to call the driver and read out an address while he is merging onto the highway. If the change is big, a quick text from the office to say “new stop at #4” is still a good habit, but the information itself is already on the phone.

Crew GPS on the office map helps here too. Before slotting a same-day call in, the office can see where each truck actually is instead of guessing.

One Truck, Two Trucks, Three

With one truck, there is one list. With two or more, each crew sees only their truck's jobs. A common setup is one truck on single items and small loads, running a lot of short stops, and another on cleanouts and big jobs, running two or three long ones. Each crew's list fits their kind of day.

Saved views on the dispatch board let the office flip between trucks quickly, and filtering by truck shows one crew's list exactly as they see it.

Why Route Order Beats a List of Addresses

A list of addresses with no order makes the driver do dispatch from the cab, every day, with no map of where the other truck is. Route order on the phone means the planning is done once, by the person looking at the whole picture, and the crew just drives. To see how route order fits with the rest of the crew's tools, visit the JunkBossPro junk removal app page.