PestBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Routes

Filtering the Dispatch Board by Truck: One Pest Control Route at a Time

With one truck, the dispatch board is the route. With two or three trucks, it gets crowded. You are looking at a residential route, a mosquito route and a commercial route all mixed together on the same day, and it is hard to tell whether any of them makes sense. Filtering by truck pulls one route out so you can look at it on its own.

Why Trucks Matter in Pest Control

Accounts come due by their plan, as covered in Quarterly, Bi-Monthly and Monthly: Scheduling Pest Control by Minimum Days Between Visits. Once they are due, the question is which truck takes them.

In pest control, the truck is more than a vehicle. It is the equipment on board, the products loaded, and usually the tech who drives it. A truck set up for mosquito barrier work carries a backpack mister and a barrier mix. A truck running commercial accounts carries bait, monitors and the products used in kitchens. A residential truck carries a perimeter mix and a granular spreader. That is why PestBossPro assigns employees to trucks and lets you filter the board by truck.

What the Filter Shows

Filter the board by a truck and you see that truck's jobs by day, the same list the tech assigned to it will see on their phone. Clear the filter and you see every truck at once.

The two views answer different questions. The whole-company view tells you whether the week is balanced. The single-truck view tells you whether a route is any good.

Checking a Route

When you filter to one truck, a few things to look at:

• Number of stops. Is it a realistic day for this tech and this kind of work? A residential perimeter route and a commercial route with long interior services are very different days.
• Geography. Are the stops grouped, or did a far-off house sneak onto a route that is otherwise all in one neighborhood?
• Work type. Did a mosquito stop land on the residential truck, or an interior service on a truck whose tech is out of interior products?
• Timing needs. Is there a restaurant that must be done before opening, or a customer who has to be home for an interior service? Those affect the order.
• Room for extras. Is there space for the call-back that will come in tomorrow morning?

Balancing Trucks

Switching between trucks quickly shows whether work is spread evenly. If Truck 1 has a packed Tuesday and Truck 2 is light, look at whether some of Truck 1's stops fit Truck 2's route that day. Move them on the board and both routes get better.

Balance does not always mean equal. A senior tech may run more stops than a new hire. A commercial truck may run fewer stops with longer visits. The goal is that each truck has a full, workable day, not that every truck has the same count.

Setting the Order One Truck at a Time

Route order is set per truck. Filter to a truck, auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, and set the order by hand where needed. Then move to the next truck. Doing it this way keeps you focused on one route and one tech's day at a time.

The auto-route options are covered in the next guide, Closest First or Furthest First: Auto-Routing a Pest Control Day From the Shop.

Other Places the Filter Helps

• Printing route sheets. Filter to a truck and print, so each tech gets a sheet with only their stops.
• Saved views. If you check each truck the same way every morning, save a view per truck so it is one click away.
• Covering a sick day. When a tech calls in sick, filter to their truck to see what needs to move, then spread those stops across the other trucks or push them to another day.
• Talking to a tech. When a tech calls with a question about tomorrow, the filtered view is the same list they are looking at.

Owner-Operators and One Truck

If you run one truck, the filter matters less day to day. But it is worth setting things up as if you will add a truck later: assign yourself to Truck 1, and keep the habit of checking routes by truck. When the second truck arrives, the board already knows how to split the work, and you will not have to rethink how you schedule.

To see how truck filtering fits with the Waiting List, auto-routing and the tech's phone, visit the PestBossPro pest control scheduling software page.