Set up your first crew

Two things have to exist first

Who does the work, and what the work is. Both live on the Crews screen, and the week board cannot hold anything until they do.

The crew

A crew is a truck-and-team, not a person: “Truck 2”, or “Mowing A”, whoever happens to be riding in it this week. What you record about it is what the board later uses to argue with you.

• A name. It is the row label on the board and the heading on the crew’s phone.
• A vehicle identifier, so the yard knows which truck is meant.
• The mower deck width, in inches. This is what lets the board tell you a 60-inch deck has been sent to a property with a 36-inch gate.
• Any licenses the crew holds. A service that needs a licensed applicator will not sit quietly on a crew that has none.

1. 1Open Crews, then New crew.
2. 2Name it, and record the truck and the deck width.
3. 3Add the licenses the people on it hold.Leave it empty if none of your work needs one.

The services you sell

On the same screen: mowing, cleanup, mulch, an application. A service can be marked as needing a license, and that mark is what makes the license you recorded against the crew mean anything.

The people

Staff are invited under Settings, then Staff, and added to a crew from the Crews screen. Seats are not charged for, so there is no reason to leave a new hire off — a business weighing up whether a login is worth the money is a business collecting worse data than it could.

Crew membership is what a phone reads to find its route. Somebody invited but never added to a crew signs in perfectly and sees an empty day, which is the most common “it isn’t working” we hear.

Retiring one

Retiring a crew does not delete it. It drops to the bottom of the list and stops appearing on the board, its history stays attached to the work it did, and you can bring it back.

Who can change what

A dispatcher can read this screen — the week board is unreadable if you do not know who the crews are — but creating and editing crews and services is an administrator’s job.