One of the most powerful tools of CLIPitc is its ability to schedule and keep track of the services you provide to your customers. This manual will outline what schedule types are available in CLIPitc, as well as how to utilize them for your company.

Before you are able to craft your schedules, you must first have your customers and their jobs setup first. 

CONTENTS

Schedule Types 

Automatic Scheduling 

Variable Scheduling 

Zone Scheduling 

Setting Up Zones

Activating Zone Jobs

Static Scheduling

The following screen shot shows us the schedule screen of CLIPitc. This manual will be covering the functionality of this screen:

Let’s break down the schedule screen one section at a time. Here is the first section we will be covering:

Schedule Type contains three different schedule options; Automatic, Zone and Static. These will be explained in greater detail later in the manual.

Next Visit is generated by the automatic scheduling option. Every time you post an automatically scheduled job as done, it will change the next scheduled visit according to the jobs schedule parameters.

Last Visit is when the last time the job was done.

Pre-Service Notifications is a drop down that dictates how your customer will receive a notification prior to your crew's arrival if at all.  It can be a phone call, an email, or both.

Done This Season is simply a rolling count of how many times you've performed this job.

Reason is a field that you can write a specific note about this job for this customer for strictly internal use. It is only viewable on this page.

The next screen gives you options for setting cutoffs for a job so that it will not be scheduled anymore after is has reached the specified cutoff.

The cutoff options are most useful for contract customers that have contracts that expire.

The first cutoff option will stop scheduling a job after it has been done an (x) amount of times.

The second option uses dates for setting the start and stop of a jobs schedule.
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Another feature in CLIPitc scheduling is the “Use Day of the Month"

If you have this option highlighted, it will give you 6 options that you can use for scheduling a job for specific days of the month. See example below:

This schedule type is going to be your most commonly used schedule type. This schedule type will give you the option to set how often a job is to be done. Furthermore, once you have set the parameters, CLIPitc will take care of the rest to make sure your customers are being serviced when they should be.

This screen shows us our options when it comes to automatic schedules.

The list you see in the drop down are some preset parameters for automatically scheduled jobs. Here's what they mean.

Make it at least This option will use the “Days Between Jobs” to set a custom amount of days between visits to a customer.

This can be used for weekly or bi-weekly schedules as well. Use 4 days if setting up a weekly scheduled service that requires a minimum of 4 days between service. Just add 7 days to the 4 days if you want to add a full week in-between jobs to make it a bi-weekly service. This gives you 11 days between jobs, and some room to catchup from rainy days.

This option can be used in many ways. It can be customized to fit any scheduled interval you would like.

Once a Week Will set the job to be serviced once every week on the first available day.

Bi-Weekly Will set the job to be done once every two weeks on the first available day.

Next Month Will schedule the job once every month on the first available day in the month.

Next Year Will schedule a job once a year on the first possible day.

One Time Only Will schedule the job to be done once and then it will not automatically schedule it again.

The buttons at the bottom of the frequency screen are there to show you what dates this job is projected to be done on.

Once you have viewed the dates and have verified that it is scheduled the way you want it to be, you are ready to go.

Variable Scheduling allows you set up CLIPitc to automatically change your customers job visit intervals several times a year. For example in the north, mow customers may only want you there once every two weeks in March and April but after that they want you to visit every week from May-August. If this is the case for most of your customers, you do not want to go to each customer and change the interval for all these customers. To avoid that, you will want to use Variable Scheduling. Here is how it works.

Go to the customer you want to set up for variable scheduling. Then go to the job you will be scheduling.

Now scroll down to the job schedule, then make sure "Make it at least" is selected in the drop down. Then check off the "Var Scheduling" check box.

Now Click on the "Variable Schedule Button". Now you should see the Variable Schedule change list.

Each job can have up to 12 schedule changes. This can span weeks, months or years. It is up to you in how you want to use it.

The first field is the date when you want the schedule change to happen. This date is looking at the job's last visit date. So when the last visit date meets or passes the date in the Change field, CLIPitc will know to change the job's schedule interval.

Here is a pretty standard example of how you may setup a mowing job's variable scheduled.

When this job is first scheduled in March is will only be done once every two weeks because my "Change Between To" is eleven. But once it recorded and posted on or after May 18th, this job will then go to a once a week schedule because my interval will then be only 4 days in between. When Fall comes around on September 25th, the job will go back to once every two weeks. Again you can make these intervals go into the next year as well if you like.

This is, in a nutshell, is how Variable Scheduling works.

Zone Schedules were designed to give you, as a company owner, the control to start jobs for a group of customers based on location and not necessarily frequency( like an automatically scheduled job).

This type of schedule is especially useful for services like snow plowing or irrigation services, just as a few examples.

Let's use snow plowing as an illustration. Snow plowing obviously is not a job that is automatically scheduled since it is a weather related job. And you do not want your guys running from one side of the town to the other when there are other customers next door to be done. This is when zone schedules are very handy. If this sounds like something that would be useful to your company, please keep reading to see how to set this type of schedule up for you company.

The first thing you will have to do is set up zones for your customers. You can have as many zones as you like. But for this illustration, we will just use zip codes. To set up zones, click on the Customize tab at the top then Zone List.

Click on the "add" button and title the zone accordingly. As you can see, I just used zip codes but you can group your customers any way you would like (I.e. towns, developments or even job types).

Now all you have to do is assign your customers jobs to the correct zones. Here's how:

Go to the customer, then go to the job that you want to be set as a zone scheduled job.

Now, select Zone from the Schedule Type drop down menu.

After you select Zone as the Schedule Type, CLIPitc will then give you the option to select the Zone that you wish to assign this Job to.

Since zone jobs are not automatic, you will need to manually activate the zones. When a zone is activated, it will pull the jobs that it is assigned to into the work bank.

To activate zone jobs, click on the Daily tab, then Get Work.

Now, you can click on Activate Zone to activate them.

Once you Click to activate, you will be given three options to select from so you can narrow down the jobs you desire to activate.

Once you have set your parameters, just click Activate! Now those jobs can be sent out to your crews to be serviced.

After zone jobs have been serviced and recorded as done, you will also have to de-activate them so that they stop coming into the work bank to be done. The process is the same as activating zone jobs, only this time you click De-Activate.

Static scheduling is a way of scheduling that depends completely on your manual input. You can setup a job scheduled for an entire year if you like, but you will need to manually enter each visit into the calendar.

Related Scheduling

Related Scheduling allows you to do a job with another. For example when you do Spring Cleanup, you can include Lawn Maintenance with it. This will appear in the Get Work screen, Record Work and Reports.

To set this up you will need to first open the customers profile and click on the Jobs tab, click on the job you want to do along with the main job then make sure the crew is the same along the the other job(s).

The next step is assigning the job and how often it happens. Under the Job Schedule field, change the Schedule type to Automatic and on the third field box, change it to Do This Job With then choose the desired job.

For this I want Lawn Maintenance to be done with Spring Cleanup so I selected Lawn Maintenance and chose Spring Cleanup from the drop down menu next to the Do this Job With field. Choose a amount you want this to happen when Spring Cleanup happens and in the Do this job, it has to match the Once Every field.

That's it! Just make sure you save and refresh the Get Work screen.

If you have any questions, please visit our Help Center or log into chat at the bottom of the page at CLIPitc.com. We'll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have!