7. Scheduling & Routes
In one sentence: Plan who visits which pool on which day, and put the stops in a sensible driving order.
Who needs this: Owner, Office
You may not see this if: your role doesn't include scheduling.
Where to find it: Schedule in the menu
7.1 How it works
- Your repeating services create stops automatically — a weekly service makes one stop a week.
- Those stops appear on the calendar.
- You put each one on a technician and a day, or let EZ Pool Biller work it out.
- You publish the week, and technicians see it on their phones.
7.2 Week and month views
The calendar opens on the week view:
- Columns are the days.
- Rows are your technicians.
- Each stop is a small card showing the customer, the place, and the service. A coloured dot tells you which service it is at a glance.
There's also a month view for seeing the shape of a whole month. Use the arrows to move between weeks or months.
Click a day to open it and see everything booked that day. Hover a stop to see its details without opening anything.
7.3 Draft and LIVE
Two words matter on this page:
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| LIVE | What your technicians can see on their phones right now |
| DRAFT | Your private copy for making changes |
Nothing you do in a DRAFT reaches anybody until you publish it. Move stops around, change your mind, start over — technicians in the field see none of it.
To make changes safely:
- Click Create a Draft.
- Make your changes.
- Click Apply Draft to LIVE when you're happy.
Return to LIVE throws the draft away and puts you back to what technicians can see. Use it when you've made a mess and want to start again.
Watch out: changes only reach technicians when you click Apply Draft to LIVE. If you've been editing for an hour and haven't clicked it, nobody has seen anything.
7.4 Moving stops around
- Drag a stop from one day or technician to another.
- Click a stop for its details, where you can change the technician, the day, and its place in the driving order.
- Stops that aren't on anybody yet sit in Overflow. Drag them onto a technician's day.
If a move breaks a rule — outside the technician's hours, or outside the hours that location allows — EZ Pool Biller stops and tells you which rule. You can go back, or choose Force anyway if you know something it doesn't.
Changing future weeks too: when you move a stop, you can tick to apply the same change to future weeks. Handy when a customer permanently switches from Tuesdays to Thursdays — you change it once instead of week by week.
7.5 Letting EZ Pool Biller plan the route
Open the Route Optimizer to have the driving order worked out for you.
- Make a Draft first (7.3).
- Open Route Optimizer.
- Choose how you want the week arranged:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Concentrate (fill early week) | Fills the earlier days first and leaves later days lighter, so you keep room to move |
| Even out workload | Spreads the work evenly across the week |
| Equal distribution (balance across techs) | Balances the load between technicians so nobody is buried |
| Single split route (contiguous days) | Keeps each technician's work in blocks of days, cutting back-and-forth |
- Run it, then look at the calendar and the map.
- Publish with Apply Draft to LIVE when it looks right.
Optimize Order is the smaller version: it leaves who-does-what alone and only fixes the driving order within each day.
Two ways to affect more than this week:
- Apply To All Weeks — the optimizer covers the whole term, not just the week you're looking at.
- Copy to Future Weeks — mirror this week's technician-and-day assignments onto every future week.
Locking a stop: if a customer can only be done on a Tuesday, lock that stop first. The optimizer works around anything locked.
It also respects technician hours and breaks, how much each technician can take on, the hours each location allows, and who's qualified for the work.
7.6 The map
Switch to the map to see the stops as pins.
- Pin colours match the technician.
- Click a pin for the customer and address.
- Lines show the driving order.
- You can show your technicians on the map as well.
This is the quickest way to spot a stop on the wrong route — one pin miles from the rest usually means it's on the wrong person.
7.7 Changes during the week
Someone reschedules, a technician calls in sick, a one-off job comes in.
- Create a Draft for this week.
- Make the changes.
- Apply Draft to LIVE.
Technicians' phones pick it up straight away — nobody has to log out or refresh.
7.8 Marking work done from the office
If a job was finished but never closed on the phone, open the service and choose Mark completed. Useful for tidying up at the end of the week.