Making a schedule
Jobs → Recurring work → New schedule
Pick the customer and the work, then say how often:
- Daily, every day or every few days.
- Weekly, on the days you choose — Tuesdays and Fridays, or every second Monday.
- Monthly on a date, for the first of the month.
- Monthly on a weekday, for the second Tuesday or the last Friday. Where a month has no fifth Wednesday, that month is skipped rather than shifted.
- Yearly, for an annual inspection.
Then say when it stops: keeps going, until a date, or after a number of visits. A twelve-month contract is twelve visits, and it ends itself.
Visits are ordinary jobs
A schedule does not create a separate kind of record. It creates real jobs, so a visit appears on the dispatch board, runs the timer, takes photos and materials, and is invoiced like anything else. Nothing downstream has to know it came from a pattern.
Corvin keeps about three months of visits on the books at a time. That is far enough ahead for a dispatcher to plan a quarter, and near enough that changing the schedule stays quick.
Telling the customer it is coming
Every schedule can text the customer before each visit. Choose how much notice — a couple of hours for a call-out, the day before for a lawn round, a week for anything that needs the yard cleared or a machine shut down.
Write the message once and it goes out before every visit, with the details filled in:
Hi {client}, {company} mows on {date}. Please clear toys from the yard so we do not have to charge to move them.
{client} {company} {title} {date} {time} {prep} are replaced when the message is sent. Leave the box empty and Corvin sends the standard reminder instead.
Move a visit and its reminder moves with it. Take a visit off the calendar and the reminder is cancelled, so nobody is told to expect you on a day you are not coming.
Work that needs the customer first
Some jobs cannot start until the customer has done something. The yard has to be clear before it can be mowed. The car has to be out of the bay. The crawlspace has to be unlocked. Turn on the customer has to confirm before we go and the visit waits on their answer rather than hoping for the best.
Write what they have to do — it finishes the sentence "please make sure…" — and the reminder asks for a yes:
Weekly mow is scheduled for 3/14. Before we arrive, please make sure the yard is clear of toys and pet waste. Reply YES to confirm, or tell us what you need and we will quote it.
You choose how late an answer still counts, and what silence means when the cutoff passes:
- Go anyway. You asked, and that is enough. Use this when the reminder is a courtesy rather than a condition.
- Go, but warn the crew. The visit stays on the board carrying a flag, so nobody is surprised at the kerb.
- Don't go. The visit comes off the route. Only that one — the rest of the series is untouched.
Answers arrive however the customer prefers. A text saying "all set" or "yard is clear" clears it, the portal has the same two buttons, and your team can confirm one over the phone. The job screen shows where every visit stands before anyone loads the trailer.
When they can't get to it
This is the part that saves the visit. A customer who cannot do their part is not stuck cancelling on you — they say so, and you offer to handle it.
"We're out of town this week and I never cleaned up after the dog. Can you do it for the extra charge?"
Corvin reads that as two things at once: the yard is not ready, and they want a price. It marks the visit unconfirmed, opens an extra-work request against it, and tells you. You put a number on it, they reply YES — and that approval clears the visit to go ahead, because you are now the one clearing the yard.
Your crew sees the difference. A visit cleared because the customer tidied up reads differently from one cleared because they paid you to, and the second says so plainly, since the cleanup is now on your list.
Declining the price is not the same as saying the yard is fine. Turn down a quote and the visit goes back to unconfirmed, and the cutoff decides from there.
When they reply
Replies land in your message inbox. When one sounds like a request for extra work — "I forgot to clean up after the dog, can you do it for the added charge?" — Corvin also opens it as a request against that visit and tells whoever you have nominated.
From there it is three taps:
- Price it. Corvin texts the customer the job and the amount, and asks them to reply YES or NO.
- They answer. A plain yes approves it; anything less clear-cut comes to you to read instead. Customers who use the portal get the same yes-or-no there.
- Bill it. An approved extra becomes an invoice line with one tap, priced at exactly what they agreed to.
Nothing is ever charged on a reply alone. An extra needs a price you set and an answer the customer gave, and the record shows which — by text, in the portal, or taken by your team over the phone.
Texting needs SMS switched on, which is part of Team and above. A customer who replies STOP is unsubscribed straight away and gets no further texts, including reminders.
Changing one, and changing all of them
Move a single visit and only that visit moves — the customer who asks to shift next Tuesday does not disturb the rest of the year.
Change the schedule itself and the future visits are rebuilt to match. Any visit that has already been started, completed or invoiced keeps its date, because those are a record of what happened and are not ours to rewrite.
End schedule stops it producing more. The visits that already happened stay where they are.
Billing the round
Each schedule says how it should be billed:
- Invoice each visit — the usual choice for per-visit work.
- Invoice when the series ends — one bill for the contract.
- No automatic invoice — for work already covered by a retainer or a service agreement.
Recurring work is part of Team and above.
Moving a round from another system?
Schedules are the one thing the importer does not bring across — recurrence rules rarely survive translation, and rebuilding a round here takes a few minutes per customer. Import the customers first, then build the schedules against them.