Dispatching

When a customer books an arrival window, the appointment lands on your schedule as Scheduled but unassigned — the customer holds a promise, but no technician is attached yet. Dispatching is how you close that gap: you decide which tech takes each window job, and when within the window they'll go.

Dispatching happens on the Dispatch board, a mode of the Calendar built for exactly this.

Opening the Dispatch board

The board is a fourth calendar view alongside Day, Week, and Month:

Open the Calendar (from Appointments, switch to the calendar view).
Click Dispatch in the view toggle at the top.
Pick the team whose day you're dispatching from the dropdown next to the toggle.

You can also jump straight there from any unassigned appointment: its detail page shows an Unassigned banner with an Open Dispatch board button that lands you on the right day.

Note: Dispatch works one team at a time. If you haven't created any teams yet, the board will prompt you to make one in Settings first — see Creating and Managing Teams.

Reading the board

The Dispatch board pivots a single day into a grid you can route against:

Technician rows — each member of the selected team gets their own horizontal lane, showing their existing appointments and synced calendar events across the day's time columns.
The Unassigned lane — across the top sits every window job that still needs a technician, parked at its promised window. This lane is organization-wide, not limited to the selected team.
Drive-time pills — between consecutive stops on a tech's lane, Driive shows the estimated drive time so you can spot routes that zig-zag.
A live "now" line — on today's board, a marker tracks the current time.

Each job is a bubble. Click one to open its flyout — the side panel with the customer's contact info, the assigned members, notes, and job details.

Assigning a job

To turn an unassigned promise into a committed appointment, give it a technician:

Drag the job's bubble from the Unassigned lane down onto a technician's row, dropping it at the time you want within the window.
Driive commits the assignment — the invisible capacity hold becomes a real appointment on that tech's calendar, and the tech is notified.

You don't have to eyeball feasibility. While you drag, the board highlights only the legal drop targets — the exact slots where that technician can actually make it, given their availability, the appointment's buffer, and drive time from their previous stop. Slots snap to a 15-minute grid, and anywhere a tech can't feasibly arrive is dimmed out.

Letting Driive suggest

Every unassigned job already carries a suggested placement — the tech and time Driive reserved when the customer booked. Open the job's flyout to see ranked candidates: which technicians can serve it, each with a reason like "9 min drive from previous stop." You can accept the top suggestion as-is or pick a different candidate.

Because a technician is only offered when the placement lands inside the promised window, you can never accidentally assign a job in a way that breaks the customer's promise.

Reassigning and unassigning

Plans change. As long as a job hasn't gone en route, you can move it freely:

Reassign / move — drag a committed bubble to a different technician or a different time. The board again shows only feasible targets. The technician who loses the job and the one who gains it are each notified; the customer is not, because the window is unchanged.
Unassign — drag a committed bubble back up to the Unassigned lane. The job returns to "needs a tech," its capacity stays reserved, and the promise is untouched. Only the removed technician is told.

Note: Moving a window job around never messages the customer — their arrival window hasn't changed, so from their side nothing happened. (Exact-time jobs are different: if you change their time, the customer is notified, since the time is the promise.)

Marking a technician en route

When the assigned tech actually heads out, mark the job en route. This does two things:

Notifies the customer that their technician is on the way — including the tech's name and contact info. See Customer Notifications.
Locks the job against casual moves. The appointment's status becomes En Route, and reassigning or unassigning it now requires an explicit confirmation (a "force") that drops it back to Scheduled first.

This is the guardrail that keeps a job from being quietly re-routed after the customer has already been told someone is coming.

How Driive keeps unassigned jobs honest

You don't have to babysit the Unassigned lane. When something changes a technician's real availability — edited working hours, a new event on a synced calendar — Driive automatically re-fits every future unassigned window job whose held plan no longer works:

If the current plan still fits, nothing changes.
If it doesn't, Driive moves the plan to another feasible slot inside the same window, preferring to keep the same suggested tech so suggestions don't bounce around.
If nothing in the window can be served anymore, the job isn't silently dropped — it's flagged with an arrival-window alert so you can sort it out by hand.

Re-fitting only touches unassigned, future jobs, and it never notifies anyone — it's pure background housekeeping. Once you've assigned a job, or once its day arrives, it's yours to manage on the board.

What dispatch never changes

A few reassurances worth keeping in mind:

Assigning, reassigning, and unassigning don't change the appointment's status — it stays Scheduled throughout. "Unassigned" isn't a status; it just means no technician is attached yet.
The customer's window is sacred. Nothing you do on the board changes what the customer was promised unless you deliberately reschedule the window itself.
Feasibility is enforced. You can't drop a job where a tech can't make it, can't double-book, and can't place a tech outside the promised window.

Arrival Windows — Set up which services book by window instead of exact time.
Appointment Statuses Explained — Unassigned, Scheduled, and the new En Route status.
Calendar Views — Day, Week, Month, and Dispatch.
Team Notifications — What technicians receive when they're assigned or removed.