Dispatch

Plan availability

Dispatch is on the Growth and Pro plans. Workspaces that predate plans keep everything they already had.

The Dispatch board is where you schedule your crew. It lays out a single Monday-to-Sunday week as seven day columns, with an Unscheduled jobs rail beside them. You schedule a job by placing it on a day — either by dragging it or by using the Schedule button — and the board keeps your week in view so you always know who is going where. This guide covers reading the board, both ways to schedule, moving a job, updating its status, changing weeks, and the day view used on small screens.

The week board

The board shows the week as seven day columns, Monday through Sunday. Each column holds the assignments scheduled for that day, and today’s column is marked so it stands out. To the side is the Unscheduled jobs rail — your active and on-hold jobs that have not yet been placed on the calendar.

The week always starts on Monday. When you open the board it shows the current week; the heading tells you which week of date you are looking at.

Scheduling a job — two ways

Every job can be scheduled in two equivalent ways. Both create the same assignment; use whichever suits you.

By dragging

Pick up a job card from the Unscheduled jobs rail and drag it onto the day you want. As you drag over a day, that column highlights to show where the job will land. Release to schedule it there. The board confirms each step out loud for screen readers, so you always hear which job you picked up, which day you are over, and where it was dropped.

You can also drag with the keyboard: focus a job card’s drag handle, press Space or Enter to pick it up, use the arrow keys to move between days, and press Space or Enter again to drop it. Press Escape to cancel.

With the Schedule button

Every job card also has a Schedule… button. This is the quickest way to schedule without dragging, and it works entirely with the keyboard. Choosing it opens a small dialog where you pick:

• The day of the week.
• The crew member to assign.
• A start time, and optionally an end time.
• An optional category (covered below).

Confirm to schedule the assignment. The dialog can be operated entirely by keyboard — Tab moves between fields, Enter confirms, and Escape cancels — so you never need a mouse to schedule a job.

Moving and rescheduling

To move a scheduled assignment to a different day, drag it from its current day onto the new one — the same as scheduling, including the keyboard drag. The assignment keeps its crew member and time and simply lands on the new day.

Assignment status

Each assignment carries a status that tracks the crew member’s progress: Acknowledged, En route, On site, and Completed. The status is always shown as text, so it reads clearly whether or not you can tell the colors apart.

The crew link

Every scheduled assignment carries a Copy status link action. It puts a link on your clipboard that you send to the crew member — by text, by email, however you already talk to them.

The link opens without signing in. The crew member taps it and lands straight on that job’s page: the details they need for the work, and a control to update their own status as the day goes — En route, On site, Completed. Those updates come straight back to the board, so the office sees progress without phoning anyone. No account, no password, no app required — which is the point, because it works for a sub or a new hire who has no QELM login at all.

The link is the pass

There is nothing else guarding the page. Anyone holding the link can open it, so treat it like a key: send it to the person doing the work and ask them not to forward it. Each assignment has its own link, so a link that got out only ever exposes that one job.

Categories

Dispatch categories are colored labels you can attach to an assignment (for example, Install or Repair) to group similar work. Categories appear as a labelled list on the board — each one shows its name beside its color swatch, so the label is never carried by color alone.

Moving between weeks

Use the Previous week, Today, and Next week buttons in the header to move the board. Today always jumps back to the current Monday-start week. Because the week selection lives in the page address, you can bookmark or share a link to a specific week.

The day view on small screens

On a phone or a narrow window, a seven-column drag board is hard to use, so the board switches to a day view: a single day’s schedule with a row of day buttons across the top to switch days. Scheduling still works through the Schedule… button on each job, so you can build the week on a small screen without dragging.

A note on what you see

The Dispatch board shows only your own workspace’s crew, jobs, and assignments, and it always schedules within your workspace — you can never assign another workspace’s crew or job. If the board looks empty, it usually just means nothing has been scheduled for that week yet. For how the rest of QELM fits together, see the Guides overview.