After signing into Sera, you will see your dispatch board.
The dispatch or schedule board displays a single day at a time. The current date will display at the top.
Colors/Icons
Note: The following colors can be changed by a super admin under Company --> Customizations --> Schedule Board. There are defaulted colors in your account for the following:
Pending (Unassigned) indicates that the appointment is not yet assigned to a technician to be worked
Pending (Assigned) indicates that the appointment is assigned to a technician to be worked
Accepted (Pre-Work) indicates that the technician has claimed the appointment and is preparing to start the trip
Accepted (Start Trip) indicates that the technician has started their trip to the location and is in transit.
Running indicates the the technician has finished their trip and is currently working at the job site.
Completed (Won Opportunity) indicates that the work is completed, and is tied to a won opportunity with revenue on the invoice.
Completed (Lost Opportunity) indicates that the work is completed, and is tied to a lost opportunity with no revenue on the invoice.
Grey Arrows indicate the travel time to an appointment.
Yellow Arrows also indicate travel time, but also mean that the appointment travel time was completed after the arrival window time.
Hold Appointments are placeholders on a technician's schedule, the real appointment will sit in unassigned in the timeframe it is scheduled for, if there are no available spots on a technician during that time the scheduler will place a hold appointment on the technician schedule it intends to assign the call to when the technician finishes their appointment. When you hover over a hold appointment it will highlight the unassigned appointment it is associated with and if you hover over the unassigned appointment it will highlight the hold appointment it is associated with.
Lock Icon If an appointment has a lock icon on it, this indicates that the appointment was pinned. This means that one of your company's staff members manually assigned this appointment to a technician. The automatic dispatcher will not move a pinned appointment. We recommend limiting the number of appointments that you pin, so that the automatic dispatcher is able to continue to dispatch for you, pinning too many appointments can lock up the automatic dispatcher by leaving little to no options for assigning appointments.
Person Icon If an appointment has a person icon on it, this indicates that it was scheduled by a customer using the widget on your website or their online customer portal and was not scheduled by one of your staff members.
Check Availability
If you need to quickly see if a spot is available for an appointment, such as having a customer on the phone who needs a specific day/time but doesn't yet want to give you any further contact information beforehand, you can use the Check Availability button to see if there are available spots.
Department Visibility
If you would like to monitor only certain departments on your Dispatch Board, you can use the multi-select tool to identify those. The default is all departments.
Date Selection
If you need to view the schedule for a different day, you can use the arrows to move the board forwards or backwards. You can also click the date and use the calendar pop-up to select the desired date. Return to the current day by using the Today button.
Dispatch Grid
The top of the Dispatch Board will display one hour time blocks. The blue line indicates the current time of day.
An unassigned section sits just below the hours, where all unassigned appointments will stay until assigned to a technician either by the Scheduler, or by an Admin Portal user.
Your departments and technicians can be found on the left-hand side of the screen, you can select the minimize button to the left of each department to hide the technicians in that department from view.
Time Off Blocks
The Dispatch Board has now two ways to show time off for tech app users:
Regular Work Hours - the technicians regular work hours from their profile are now displayed clearly on the Dispatch Board. The regular work hours are a white background and the hours that the technician is scheduled off in his profile in the Regular Work Hours section are a light gray.
Time Off Exceptions - exceptions/schedule blocks that are entered into the calendar within the technician's profile are now displayed as a block to the schedule that contains a dotted background to make those time off occurrences more easily distinguishable from a regular appointment block. Hovering over the time off exception will give you a pop up with the entire verbiage of that block.
Smart Scheduler
The scheduler will use the Service Category selected during the appointment request, the technicians assigned to the service category, and their available times to determine the best technician to be assigned to the appointment. If there are multiple available technicians who qualify for the appointment, your Dispatch Strategies will be used to determine which technician is selected. Please see our article on Dispatch Strategies for more information.