HVACBossPro Blog — Dispatch & Scheduling

Setting HVAC Route Order by Hand When the Map Isn't the Whole Story

A route built purely on geography is a good start and a poor finish. The map knows where each house is. It does not know who will be home, which building opens at 7, which attic turns into an oven by early afternoon, or which call has an elderly customer sitting in a warm house. That knowledge lives with the dispatcher, and setting route order by hand is how it gets onto the tech's phone.

Start With Auto-Routing

The quick way to get a sensible first draft is covered in Closest First or Furthest First: Auto-Routing HVAC Vans From the Shop. Run that first. It handles the bulk of the ordering and leaves you to make a handful of deliberate changes, rather than ordering twelve stops from scratch.

Then look down the list and ask one question of each stop: is there a reason this one cannot happen where it landed? Most stops will be fine. A few will not.

Reasons to Move a Stop

Common reasons HVAC dispatchers override the map:

• Customer availability. A tune-up customer who works afternoons and can only let the tech in before noon. An inside job needs someone home.
• Urgency. A no-cool call for a vulnerable customer goes next, even if it is across town.
• Commercial access. An office building that wants the rooftop unit serviced before tenants arrive, or a restaurant that wants work done before the lunch rush.
• Attic heat. In summer, attic units early in the day, closet and garage units later.
• Parts. A follow-up repair where the part has to be picked up first, so that stop goes after the pickup.
• Long jobs. A big diagnostic or a messy drain line issue placed where it will not push every later stop past dark.

Write the reason in the job notes. “Customer home until 11 only” tells the next dispatcher why that stop sits at the top, and stops someone from re-routing it to the bottom.

How It Works on the Board

On the HVACBossPro dispatch board, filter to the van and change the position of the stop in its route. The tech's phone shows the new order. There is no separate step to send the change, and no group text explaining that stop 6 is now stop 2.

If you re-run auto-routing later in the day, check your hand-placed stops afterward. Auto-routing orders by location, so it may move them. A quick look at the top few stops after any re-route is a good habit.

Route Order and the Customer

Route order is not only an internal matter. Customers see it too. Customers who chose the “when I'm next” alert get a text as the van approaches, and the on-the-way text goes out when the tech taps Start on their job. In the customer app, the live route map shows their place in line, such as “You're stop 12 of 20.”

That means a customer you told “morning” should be early in the route, and the order on the board should match what you promised on the phone. The live map is covered in You're Stop 12 of 20: The Customer App's Live Route Map for HVAC Customers.

Do Not Overdo It

It is tempting to hand-place every stop. Resist it. Each hand-placed stop is a constraint, and too many constraints turn a tidy route into a zigzag. A good rule is to only move a stop when there is a specific reason you could write in the notes. If the reason is “I just feel like it,” leave it where auto-routing put it.

The same goes for promises on the phone. Every time the office promises a specific time, a stop gets pinned. A few pinned stops are fine. A day of them is a day of driving back and forth. Many offices give a day or a half-day instead and rely on the on-the-way text, which is covered in the arrival window guide later in this series.

Let the Tech Weigh In

Techs know their territory. A tech who says “do the Oak Street pair before lunch because the school traffic is terrible after 2” is giving you routing knowledge the map does not have. Encourage techs to tell the office, and adjust the next time that area comes up.

Over a season, these small adjustments become habits, and the routes get better without anyone thinking hard about it. The full set of routing and dispatch tools is on the HVACBossPro HVAC dispatch software page.