A small contractor needs a dispatch board that answers three questions at a glance: who is where today, what state each job is in, and what is planned for tomorrow. Anything beyond that is optional for a crew of a few trucks, and paying for it is a choice, not a necessity.
It helps to think of the board as a set of jobs it does for the person in the office, not as a list of features.
The jobs a dispatch board does
- Shows today's jobs in a column or row per technician, in time order, with address and job type
- Lets you drag a job to another technician or another time when someone runs late or calls in sick
- Shows job status reported from the field: travelling, on site, waiting for parts, complete
- Sends the customer an on-the-way text when the technician sets off, without the office having to call
- Carries parts notes: what is needed, whether it is on the truck, and whether a return visit is required
- Holds tomorrow's plan, so the office can confirm appointments and technicians can check their first job the night before
- Keeps unassigned jobs in a visible holding area so nothing is forgotten
If your current tool does these reliably, it is doing the real work of dispatch.
What a small crew does not need
Route optimisation across a large fleet, automatic assignment by skill, capacity forecasting and multi-branch views solve problems that come with scale. With three or four trucks, the dispatcher already knows who is good at what and which side of town they are on. Automatic assignment can be slower than a person who knows the crew.
Live map tracking sits in the middle. It is useful when customers ask where the technician is and nobody can answer. If the on-the-way text and job status already cover that, the map may be a pleasant view you rarely open.
Writing your own must-have list
Sit with whoever runs the board for one ordinary week and write down what they really do with it. Then sort it into four columns:
- Must have: things used daily, where losing them would mean phone calls and paper
- Useful: things used weekly, which a simpler method could cover
- Unused: things you pay for and have not opened this quarter
- Missing: things you work around, such as a whiteboard for parts on order or a group chat for schedule changes
The missing column is the most revealing. A workaround that the whole crew relies on is a requirement, whatever the software thinks.
Take the list to any demo. Ask the vendor to show each must-have being done, on a phone as well as on a desktop, and ignore the rest of the tour.
Checking what the board costs you
Dispatch is normally one module within field service software priced per user, so the cost of the board is tied to your headcount. Put your seats, add-ons and any platform fee into our free calculator for per-seat software bills to see the yearly and three-year figure. If the figure is modest for what you get, stay where you are. Rented software is a good answer for plenty of small crews.
If you are paying for a large system and using the seven jobs above, there is another route. Our guide to owning your software explains when building is sensible and when it is not. Hiro's version of it is to rebuild only what your must-have list contains, run it beside your current board on real jobs, and switch nothing off until you have watched it hold up. The page for home service contractors has more detail.