Planning the day and sending it to the crew

You line up tomorrow's PMs, then a customer calls about a unit that won't start, and half of what you just placed has to move. That's most afternoons in a service shop, so we built the board in Office around one distinction: the plan you're working on and the plan the crew is working from are different things, and Office keeps them apart until you send.

What the board shows

Your people run down the side and the day runs across the top, and you drag visits into place. The time grid scrolls sideways while the names stay put, so on a long day you don't lose track of whose row you're in. Short visits still get a card big enough to read and grab, with a mark showing how long the visit actually runs, and two short visits back to back stack instead of hiding each other. Drag one of those short cards and the arrival lands wherever you drop it.

A dashed card is a draft you've placed but haven't sent, and a solid card is what the techs have in Field. Orange on either one means the visit wants a look, whatever state the card is in. If you forget which is which, there's a legend on the board at tablet sizes.

Drafts are yours until you send

Moving a sent visit doesn't change what the tech sees. Save it as a draft and the board shows your proposal, including a different day or a different person, while Field keeps the plan you already sent. Drafts survive a reload and the other managers in the shop can see them, so you can rough in the day at four o'clock and finish it in the morning. When you review a draft, the currently sent time and crew sit beside what you're proposing, which is where you catch the move you didn't mean to make.

If someone else changes the schedule while you're holding a draft on the same visit, the draft goes stale instead of quietly overwriting their change, and you can discard it back to the sent plan. Cancelling a visit or otherwise taking it out of play pulls it from Field and clears any draft on it at the same time.

Overlaps are allowed while you're planning, because you often need two visits in the same slot for a minute while you work out which one moves. Sending is where they have to be dealt with: you either resolve the overlap or save a reason on the visit, and that reason stays with the visit. That check only says the appointments don't collide. Whether access is arranged, the travel fits, the tech is qualified and the parts are on the truck is still your call, and the board won't make it for you.

Sending the day

When the day looks right, open the review, pick the visits you want to send, and send them in one action. Everything you picked goes together or nothing does, so if one visit fails a check the rest stay as drafts and the crew keeps the old plan. The overlap check runs against the finished arrangement rather than one move at a time, which is why you can swap two techs' slots without the board complaining halfway through. If the connection drops while the send is going out, sending again is safe and won't dispatch anything twice.

A service call that just came in doesn't need the full review. Send the one visit on its own and it goes through the same checks as the reviewed day.

What the tech gets

Sending updates the tech's assignments in Field, and nothing reaches a tech from a draft. Each tech affected by the send gets a dispatch alert in Field to acknowledge. For today's plan, if a tech hasn't acknowledged after five minutes Bolt sends one text, and if there's no phone we can reach the app on, the text goes right away. Another five minutes with no acknowledgement and the board shows that person as needing a call. Techs acknowledge in Field or, where your shop has text replies set up, by replying to the text with the reference in it, and a tech on the roster with a phone number and no app account can acknowledge the same way.

Bolt won't keep buzzing them. If it can't tell whether a message made it through, it marks the tech as needing a call rather than sending again, because a duplicate page at the wrong moment is worse than you picking up the phone. Sent means you sent it and acknowledged means they got it, and with the reception most of your crew works in, acknowledged is the one to wait for before you assume the truck has turned around.

Work with no time on it

An appointment, an arrival window, an anytime visit and an unscheduled one are all real states on the board, so a flexible PM doesn't fall off just because nobody promised the customer 9:00. An anytime visit on a tech's day does count against an appointment that day when the board checks for conflicts. We'd rather be conservative about a day that already has a commitment on it than let a flexible job quietly double-book someone. A draft move of today's work also doesn't hide today's unfinished-work follow-up, so the visit that didn't get done still shows as owed until someone deals with it.

People, hours and days off

You can schedule anyone on the roster, including crew who came in from an imported schedule and don't have a BoltWright login. A missing login tells the board nothing else about the person. Whether they're active, what they're qualified for, when they're available and whether we have a phone number that works are separate facts, each recorded on its own in Team. An empty skills list means nobody has recorded them yet, and an empty day means there are no bookings recorded for that person, which is not the same as knowing they're free.

Normal hours are optional. If you set them, each working day gets one block of hours in the shop's timezone, and the week can mark days off. Scheduling someone outside their normal hours is a warning rather than a block, since an agreed after-hours call is a normal part of the trade and the board shouldn't stand in the way of one. A dated exception can replace a day's hours or mark the person unavailable, and marking them unavailable is treated more firmly than a mismatch. Resetting the exception restores the normal week, and visits already on the board stay where they are either way. If someone is off for a stretch, you can pause them from Team and resume them later, and a pause never changes their login or account access.

Arrival notes are about records

Later in the day the board tells you when an arrival wasn't recorded and, separately, when one was recorded after the promised window. Those are two different notes, and both are about the records rather than where the tech is standing. A missing arrival can mean the phone hasn't had signal, or that the tech hasn't tapped it yet. Open the visit and the drawer shows the times and facts behind each note, including a normal-hours mismatch, so you can decide whether it's worth a call.

Updated September 21, 2026.