Use the Uptick Scheduler and calendar to keep all your technician's calendars within Uptick. Easily drag and drop repairs and inspection work into your technician's week, send notifications about upcoming visits to your property managers and tenants, add leave and toolbox meetings and communicate efficiently with your technicians with their in App calendar and notifications. You can also see task sessions on the scheduler if Show on scheduler is enabled on the Timesheet settings
Setup
Once enabled by us and permissions are applied, you can find the Scheduler in Tasks > Scheduler.
How to use
Day View
The "day" view has vertical columns to better accommodate wide screens. Filter for tasks on the left, then drag and drop those tasks into a time slot for a specific technician on the right. See gaps in your technicians day, where they will be and what they are doing, easily.
Weekly View
Monthly View
The new monthly scheduler view allows you to see your entire teams workload in a single screen. Spot individual technician under-utilisation using the colour coded cards, and see overall team capacity with the top bar graph.
View the current day
Whatever view you're in and no matter what date range you're currently looking at, you can always return to the current day by clicking on Today.
Timezone differences
When scheduling a task, you will be warned if you are scheduling across different timezones. Uptick will compare the following factors:
Timezone of the task
Your browsers timezone
Your user preferences timezone
Timezone of the technician being scheduled
If any of these timezones are different, an adjacent calendar for that timezone will display to help you schedule correctly.
The appointment that you create will always be in the timezone specific to the task you are scheduling, or if you are creating a non-task event, the timezone of the technician you are creating the event for. If you are seeing a timezone that you don’t expect to see, check the following:
That your browsers timezone matches the timezone in your user preferences
That the technicians timezone is correct in their user preferences.
That the task has been correctly geocoded.
For a non-property based task, this happens automatically when you geocode the task address.
For a property based task, the task timezone comes from the property timezone, which is set when you geocode the property.
That your default timezone is correct, which is set via your Control Panel.
Creating Appointments Continued..
When you drag a task into a time slot in the calendar, you're greeted with an option to add more information to the appointment before the appointment is saved. This is where you can assign the appointment to multiple techs, add an Appointment Category (see below for more info), change the date and time and add any extra notes about this appointment. All this information appears to the technician and office views.
Using the Map View
In the New Scheduler tasks are listed in the left hand column in List view by default. By switching to Map View you can get functionality similar to that of the geo-allocator, allowing you to view tasks on the map as pins that can be directly dragged across to the time slot and field staff of your choice.
Daily route map
The New Scheduler displays an automatically generated route map when you drag the task over to the technician. Map points are numbered from the first appointment of the day to the last, showing the most efficient route to be taken when travelling from one task to the next. Make sure all the properties are geocoded in order for the map routing to display in the scheduler
Appointment Categories:
Add categories to your appointments to help distinguish between certain appointments. An example of this might be telling you straight away which appointments are 'Flexible' or 'Not Booked'.
See the above Week view to understand how your office and techs see the categories once the appointment is saved.
Setting up more categories: Go to Control Panel > Appointments > Create new item.
Scheduling 'Sick leave' and other non-task related events
On the scheduler, you are also able to create Non-task Events i.e. events that don't have a task attached. An example of a Non-task Event is Sick Leave, Toolbox meetings, RDOs etc. Click the 'Schedule non-task event' button on the top, left of the Scheduler to add an event.
Setting up non-task event options: Go to Control Panel > Timesheets > Create new Task session types.
Sending Notifications to property managers and other contacts
1. Click 'Send Notifications' on the top, left of the Scheduler.
This will take you to a formatted list of all your company's appointments which can then be filtered by schedule date and more. Once you've filtered for the appointments you wish to send a notification for, bulk select all those appointments and click 'Edit Appointments'.
2. Select who you would like to send a notification email to for these appointments.
1. Primary Contact of the Client. The client will receive just ONE email with all appointments listed.
2. Property Contacts. This will go through each property and send an individual email to each property contact with the 'Notification' box ticked on the property. If 'Notification' isn't ticked on a property's contact, then they will not be sent a notification. This will also in the technician assigned to that appointment.
The emails you send to clients or property contacts can be completely customised. You also can build several different email templates depending on the type of appointment it is or how much access you need.
Recurrent appointments
Uptick allows you to set up recurrent appointments against your maintenance work so that once tasks are generated, they automatically get assigned to a technician and a time slot. This will help automate your scheduling, keep technicians informed and decrease your workload each month.
Weekly or fortnightly maintenance work would be a perfect example of where you could add automation.
Go to the Routine tab on the property.
Click Manage Routine Services
Click on the Level you want to add an appointment to > Click Schedule Recurrent Appointment.
To then assign a technician to that appointment, go back to the Routines tab of that property and click View Default Technicians and add a default technician to this property. When adding a default technician, you can either keep the service group blank meaning that technician will be assigned to all appointments and tasks for that site, or select a the service group so they are only applied to the subset of tasks that apply to that service group.
Note: The Scheduler will show you upcoming recurrent appointments that haven't yet been generated as forecasted appointments.
If a default technician has not been configured, the task will still have a status of Scheduled, but will not appear on the scheduler the view is designed with technician allocation in mind. You can check if properties do not have a technician allocated by using the default technician allocator.
Keywords: adhoc, ad-hoc, sick leave, non-task, non task, nontask