Fieldworkers on the scheduler: location, nearby jobs and leave

Two things on the board are about the person rather than the work: where they are, and whether they are available at all.

Where a fieldworker is

Scheduling well is partly geography: the right person for a job at four o’clock is often whoever is already nearby. The pin on a resource row answers that without leaving the board.

In a Resources scheduler each row carries the person’s address and a pin. Clicking it opens their location.

Scheduler → resource row → location pin

• The name, and a freshness badge — Stale above — with Last location update spelling it out: 4 months ago.
• A map centred on their last known position, with a dashed circle showing the radius being searched.
• Nearby Jobs — how many jobs fall inside that circle.
• Radius — the size of the circle, 6 KM above, changed from the dropdown.

Widening the radius takes in more work; narrowing it keeps the answer to genuinely close by.

Read the freshness before you trust the position

The badge is the important part. A position is only as good as the last time the fieldworker’s app reported in, and Stale with 4 months ago means the dot on the map is history, not where they are now.

Treat a fresh position as a fact and a stale one as a starting address.

What it is for

• Filling a gap with something close. A fieldworker with an empty afternoon and three jobs within six kilometres is a better answer than a job across town.
• Answering “who can get there?” — an urgent call comes in, and the question is not who is free but who is near.

Where the job then goes is decided the usual way, by dragging it onto that person’s row. See scheduling work on the board.

For live tracking of everyone at once rather than one person at a time, see viewing all fieldworkers on the map.

Booking leave

Leave is how the board knows somebody is not available. Booking it puts the absence where the work would have gone, so nobody is scheduled into a day they were never going to work.

Fieldworkers book their own from the app, under User leaves, and what they ask for arrives here — see expenses and leave in the app. To book it for them:

Add in the scheduler toolbar, then Add Leave.

• Select User — who is off.
• Select Leave Type — annual, sick, earned, whatever you use.
• Start date and time and end date and time — leave can be an afternoon or a fortnight.
• Add Note for anything worth recording, and Reason for why.

Save books it, and Leave added successfully confirms.

Making your own leave types

The + beside Select Leave Type adds a type without leaving the form: type the title — Earned Leave — and press the check icon to save it. It is then available for this booking and every one after.

Setting up the handful your company actually uses is worth doing once, so leave is reportable later rather than being a pile of free-text reasons.

What leave means for planning

An absence sits on the board like anything else, so a dispatcher looking for who is free sees that the gap is not a gap.

Work already scheduled on a person who then goes off is not moved for you — drag those strips onto whoever is picking them up. See moving work by dragging.