The Schedule page includes two columns, T (for in-town) and A (for in-area). These columns are used (an * will appear in the column) to show which days on the calendar you already have jobs scheduled in the current customer's town or area. This information can help you select a good day to schedule this job, because by grouping jobs into geographical areas you help to cut down travel time between jobs and contribute to operating efficiency.
Thus, after retrieving a given customer's record, and you wish to schedule a job for the customer, a glance at these columns in the Schedule page will help you to pick the best date for the job.
The asterisks provide a visual indicator of days in which you already have jobs scheduled in this (the current) customer's town or area, which helps to minimize travel time between jobs.
In this example, the current customer is Bill Jones, who lives in Floral Park. Today is 3/23/11, which appears as the topmost row in the Schedule page.
Bill needs to schedule a Spring turn on for his sprinkler system.
First we locate her customer record in the database, and then we look at the schedule page to see when we already have a crew scheduled to be in the town of Elmont or the surrounding area.
Looking at the schedule page, we can see (by looking for asterisks) that we have
25 jobs scheduled for 05/09, at least one of which is specifically in Elmont
11 jobs scheduled for 05/22, also with at least 1 job scheduled in Elmont
Since we already have jobs scheduled on these dates in Elmont, we can take advantage of being in the area and add Sally's job to one of these dates. Since 5/22 already has 25 jobs scheduled, we'll schedule Sally for 5/22.
For job scheduling purposes, H2OS includes a facility (the AREAS page) that you can use to group towns (zip codes) into areas of your designation.
As shown in this example, the AREA NAME column has been used to assign towns in NY ZIP Codes into areas of this H2OS customer's choosing. In this example, Albertson 11507 has been assigned to the NORTH HEMPSTEAD area, and Amagansett 11930 has been assigned to the EAST HAMPTON area.
Areas can be given names of your choosing. For scheduling purposes, these names serve no purpose other then to determine if a customer's town is within the same area as other customers already on the schedule (the 'A' column).
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