🚀Dispatch
Dispatch is where you run the day: put every stop under the right crew, in the right order, keep an eye on the field, and close the day out.
Think of Dispatch as the whiteboard in your shop, except it updates itself. Every scheduled visit shows up here on its date, grouped under the crew that's doing it, in the order they'll drive. You move things around, the crews' phones update, and the invoices are ready when the work is done. Open Dispatch →
This page covers the screen and a typical day. The linked pages go deeper on each part.
A quick tour of the screen
Click Dispatch in the left navigation. Here is what you're looking at, top to bottom.
1. The header. On the left, the word Dispatch and a running count such as "38 jobs • 12 completed" for whatever the board is showing. In the middle, the four tabs (below). On the right: a tray icon that opens the side panel, a Map button, and a ⋯ menu with Assistant, Optimize routes, Print, Share, and the save-view options.
2. The four tabs. Each one is a different way of looking at your work:
Scheduled — the day's plan. This is where you'll spend most of your time.
Needs attention — everything that needs a decision from you: skipped stops, stops with no crew, double-bookings, and so on. The red number on the tab is how many. See Needs attention.
Unscheduled — jobs that exist but have no date yet, with a Schedule button on each row.
Close out — yesterday's completed work, with the money columns showing, so you can check totals before invoices go out. See Closing out the day.
Any views you save yourself appear as extra tabs after these four. See Views, filters, and columns.
3. The filter row. The first chip is the date, with ◀ ▶ arrows on either side to step forward or back. Next to it: a search box, the Status, Team, and Service chips, and an All filters button for everything else (tags, last serviced, red flags, chemical rounds, and snow if you run snow removal). Once you change a tab's filters, a Clear filters button appears next to All filters; click it to put the tab back the way it was saved. On the far right, Columns lets you choose what the table shows, and Group lets you group rows by crew, by status, by red flag, or not at all.
4. The board. Rows are stops (one row per customer visit). Rows are grouped into lanes, one per crew, plus an Unassigned lane at the bottom for stops that don't have a crew yet. The small number at the left edge of each row is the crew's route order — stop 1, stop 2, and so on. Hover a row and that number turns into a checkbox so you can select it.
Each row shows a small status icon (a blue calendar check for Scheduled, a green check for Completed, and so on; hover it for the name, and the Status filter uses the same icons), the customer and address, the service, the crew, when that customer was last serviced, and a single most-useful button under Actions — usually Complete, or Reschedule if the stop was skipped or sent back. The ⋯ at the end of the row opens everything else you can do with that stop.
5. The side panel and the map. The tray icon opens a panel with two tabs: Backlog (customers with services waiting to be scheduled) and Unclosed (hourly visits from earlier days that nobody finished). The Map button opens a map band below the table showing every crew's route. See Route map.
Your day in Dispatch, start to finish
Here's the routine most dispatchers settle into. None of it is mandatory, but it's the fastest way to a calm morning.
The afternoon before: look at tomorrow
Open the Scheduled tab and click ▶ once to move to tomorrow. Two things to check:
Is anything in the Unassigned lane? Those stops won't appear on anyone's phone. Click the crew chip on the row (it says Unassigned in red) and pick a crew, or drag the row into a crew's lane. See Assign crews and set the route order.
Does each crew have a reasonable amount of work? The count in each lane header tells you at a glance.
If you run recurring work, most stops arrive already assigned to the crew that owns the job, so this step usually takes a minute. See Crew ownership.
Put the stops in driving order
Grab a row by the grip at its left edge and drag it up or down within the lane. When you drop, a dark pill appears in the corner with two buttons, Keep every Tuesday (or whichever day it is) and Undo. Keep every Tuesday saves this as the crew's regular order for that weekday, so you don't have to do it again next week. See Making an order stick.
To let Shortcut work out the order instead, choose Optimize routes from the header's ⋯ menu (all crews) or Optimize from a crew's own ⋯ menu (just that crew). You'll see a preview before anything changes. See Optimize routes and the Assistant.
Leave instructions for the crew
Open a stop (click the customer name), scroll to Operational notes, and click Add note to leave something like "Gate code 4412 — dog in the back yard". You can make it apply to this visit only or every visit. The crew sees it on their phone; customers never see it. See Operational notes.
Tell customers, if you need to
Tick the stops, then click Send update on the black toolbar that appears at the bottom. Pick SMS or email, write the message or choose a template, and click Review recipients. Before anything sends, Dispatch shows exactly who will get it and who won't (no phone on file, opted out, and so on). See Messaging from Dispatch.
Print the day's invoices (optional)
If your crews leave paper invoices, open ⋯ → Print to print one invoice per stop on the board (or just the rows you've selected). See Printing invoices.
During the day: let the board come to you
Leave Dispatch open. It refreshes itself every few seconds, silently, without losing your place or your selection. As crews work, rows change status and small icons appear beside customer names when something needs a look — a crew note or photo, a stop still open from a previous day, a past-due balance.
When a crew can't do a stop, they tap Reschedule or Skip visit on their phone. That stop's button in Dispatch changes to Reschedule, and the stop lands on the Needs attention tab. Nothing gets lost.
If you move a stop onto or off a crew's day, the crew gets a "Your route changed" push notification that names the stop. A reorder notifies them only when it changes their next three stops, and the notification tells them where to go next. On their Today list, changed stops are marked Added or Moved. See What your crew sees.
End of day: close out
Open the Close out tab. It shows yesterday's completed work (use the date arrows for today) with the money columns, so you can check totals before invoices go out.
Then glance at two counters: the red number on Needs attention, and the Unclosed count in the side panel. Clearing both each day is the single best habit in Dispatch. See Closing out the day.
Things worth knowing early
Most changes don't ask "are you sure?" Assigning, reordering, rescheduling, and completing just happen, and each one gives you an Undo for a few seconds. Only Cancel and Mark handled ask you to confirm, because they can't be undone. See Closing out a stop that won't be rescheduled.
Search finds any customer, on any date. If you search a name and get nothing, they really aren't scheduled anywhere, not just on the day you're looking at.
Dragging a stop to another crew moves this visit only. The job still belongs to its owner crew, and next week's visit goes back to them. To change the crew for good, open the stop and use This and future visits. See Crew ownership.
You can't reorder while a filter or sort is on, or while looking at more than one day. The drag grip greys out and tells you why. Clear filters gets you back to the saved tab in one click.
Route order is per day. Setting this Tuesday's order doesn't touch any other day, not even next Tuesday, unless you click Keep every Tuesday.
Related pages
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