JunkBossPro Blog — Scheduling & Dispatch

From Approved Estimate to Scheduled Junk Job Without Retyping Anything

The gap between “yes” and “booked” is where a lot of junk jobs get lost. The customer approves the quote by text on a Tuesday night. The owner means to put it on the board in the morning. By Thursday it's buried under a dozen new requests, and the customer calls to ask whether anyone is coming.

Picking Up After the Visit

Scheduling the walk-through itself is covered in Putting On-Site Estimate Visits on the Junk Removal Schedule. This guide starts after the visit, when the estimate goes out and the customer says yes.

In JunkBossPro, estimates are built from your own service list. The customer approves online, and the approved estimate becomes the scheduled job. Nobody copies the services, the address or the notes into a new form. What you quoted is what gets scheduled.

Build the Estimate With Scheduling in Mind

A good estimate does two jobs: it tells the customer the price, and it tells the crew what they're walking into. Since the estimate becomes the job, whatever you put on it shows up on the board and on the crew's phone. When you build it, include:

• The services from your list: a full truck load, an estate cleanout, a hot tub removal, a same-day service charge, whatever applies.
• The load size, so dispatch knows how much of the truck it takes.
• What's going, in plain words: “Everything in the garage except the workbench and the red cabinet.”
• Access notes from the visit: gate codes, which door, parking.

Estimate templates help here. If you quote garage cleanouts all the time, a template with the usual services and notes gets you most of the way, and you fill in the rest from the walk-through.

The Customer Approves Online

The customer gets the estimate and approves it online. No printing, no signing in the driveway, no “I'll get back to you” that turns into weeks. If they don't approve right away, estimate follow-up emails help bring them back to it.

Once they approve, the job exists. It needs a day and a truck, and until it gets them, it sits on the Waiting List map with the rest of the unbooked work.

Putting It on a Truck

An approved estimate is usually a bigger job, since the small ones get priced over the phone. That makes it a natural fit for the cleanout truck if you run two. Look at the load size and the haul-to stops and decide:

• Half day or full day? A 3/4 load garage might share a day with a few small stops. A 2-load estate cleanout gets the truck to itself.
• Which haul-to stops? Donation center first for good furniture, then the transfer station.
• How many people? Note it on the job if it needs an extra hand.

Big cleanout days have their own guide: Scheduling a Big Cleanout Day: Estates, Garages and Storage Units.

Tell the Customer When

Once it's on the board, let the customer know the day. A quick two-way text from the office does it. From there, the customer's alert preferences take over: a reminder the night before, a text when they're next and a text when the crew arrives.

For a cleanout, the night-before reminder is especially useful. It's the customer's cue to pull the car out of the garage, set aside anything that stays, and make sure the family member with the key will be there.

What the Crew Sees

On the day, the job shows on the crew's phone in route order, with the load size, item count, what's going, access notes and past notes. The notes from the walk-through are right there. The person who did the estimate doesn't have to be on the truck for the crew to know what to take and what to leave.

When the crew taps Complete, the invoice is created from the job, which came from the estimate. If the dump ticket shows more weight than your price includes, the office can add the dump fee overage from the ticket's tons. The price the customer approved is the starting point for what they pay.

One Record From Quote to Paid

The point of all this is that there's one record. The estimate, the job, the route stop and the invoice are the same piece of work, not four copies. Nothing gets retyped, so nothing gets typed wrong. For more on scheduling and dispatch, see the JunkBossPro junk removal scheduling software page.