Schedule proposals — let the scheduler crew your week
By the end of this article you will know what a schedule proposal is, how to generate one, and how to turn it into real assignments — or throw it away.
What a proposal is
A schedule proposal is the scheduler’s answer to “who should do the jobs on these days?”. You pick a day or a week; it looks at every job in that range that has nobody assigned, at your technicians’ hours, days off, eligibility for each service, weekly hours caps, existing bookings and driving between stops, and proposes a crew for each job. Nothing changes on the calendar until you commit it.
Schedule proposals are part of the Business plan. On other plans the page shows an upgrade notice instead.
Generate one
Work → Schedule Proposals:
- Under Generate a proposal, pick a Date and a Range: That day, or That week (the week containing the date, starting on your business’s week-start day).
- Leave Re-plan crewed jobs too unticked to plan only the jobs with nobody assigned — crews you have already set stay as they are. Tick it to let the scheduler re-plan every job in the range, crews included.
- Click Generate. You land on the proposal, which says Generating while the scheduler works and updates itself when it is Ready for review.
Recent proposals underneath lists earlier ones with their Range, Status and when they were Requested; Open returns to any of them.
Read the board
The proposal shows one lane per technician per day, with each job placed in its slot. The line above the board sums it up — for example 6 of 8 jobs placed · 3 kept as already crewed.
- A job that already had a crew (and was not re-planned) shows with a lock and Already crewed — not changed by this proposal.
- A planned job shows the drive from the previous stop and a Move to… list: pick another person to put them in this slot instead. The scheduler answers with its verdict — if it would not have done that, the job is marked and the reason shown (for example Outside their working hours or Already booked at that time), but the move stands: you may know something it does not.
- A job that needs more than one person has one card per crew slot, labelled Crew 1 of 2 and so on.
- Below the lanes, the unplaced list names every job nobody could take and why — Closed that day, Not eligible for this service, Outside their working hours, Over their weekly hours cap, Already booked at that time — with Assign to… to place it by hand.
Commit or discard
- Commit to calendar writes every planned job’s crew to the calendar in one go, through the same rules as assigning by hand: eligibility, booking conflicts and the overtime policy all apply, and if any one job is refused nothing is written. The proposal becomes Committed, and each technician gets the usual assignment notification.
- Discard throws the proposal away; the calendar is untouched and the proposal reads Discarded.
A proposal commits once. If a job in it was edited after the proposal was generated — moved, re-lined, re-crewed — the commit is refused and the page names the job; generate a fresh proposal.
Good to know
- A proposal is a snapshot. Bookings that arrive after it was generated are not in it.
- If drive times could not be estimated, the board says so; placements still avoid clashes, and a regenerated proposal will order stops by driving again.
- The same engine powers Suggest on a single job’s Technicians field — see Assign technicians to a job.