Plan the Week, Dispatch the Day
By Jotter Team
The Monday morning problem
Most service businesses, freelancers, and trades teams plan the week the same way. A whiteboard in the office. A group chat that scrolls too fast. A spreadsheet that one person keeps and nobody else trusts. Phone calls every morning to confirm who is doing what.
It works, until it does not. Someone misses a job because they did not see the message. Two people show up at the same site. A customer rings to ask when you are coming and nobody has a clean answer.
We have been building something for this. A scheduling calendar that lives in your Jotter portal, with the day's work pushed straight to your team's phones.
What is new
A new tab in the company portal called Schedule. It is a calendar you can flip between Day view and Week view.
In Day view, each team member gets their own column. You can see the full day at a glance, who is on what, and where the gaps are. In Week view, you get seven columns across, one per day, so you can plan the shape of the week before it starts.
On the left there is an Unscheduled rail. Any job that has not been booked in yet sits there, ready to drag onto the calendar. Pick it up, drop it on a day and a time slot, and assign it to whoever is doing the work. If something changes, drag it to a new time, a new day, or hand it to a different team member. Grab the bottom edge of a block to make a job longer or shorter.
Each person on your team gets their own colour from a six-slot palette, so the calendar reads at a glance. If a job has two people assigned, it shows up as a block in each person's column in their own colour. There is a "Now" line that rolls down today's column so you always know where you are in the day.
Made for the way teams actually work
A few of the smaller things, because they matter once you start using it every day.
- Show and hide team members. If you only need to see two people today, untick the rest. Your view is saved to your profile, so it sticks the next time you open the page.
- Set your own day hours. A 6am start or a 9pm finish, whatever your business actually does. Save it once and the calendar stops cutting off the early or late jobs.
- Real-time updates. When one person schedules a job, everyone else looking at the calendar sees it appear within a second. No refresh button, no stale view.
- Quick edits. Click a job on the calendar and a small modal opens for changing the time, the assignee, or the title. Need more? There is an Open Full Editor button that takes you to the full job screen.
What the team sees on their phone
Scheduling only helps if the people doing the work can see what is on. So we have brought it into the iOS and Android apps too.
Open the Jobs list and at the top you will see a Today section. It shows the jobs you are on for today, in order, with the start time on the left and the customer and job number on the right. Below that is a This Week section, grouped by day, so you can glance at Tuesday and Wednesday without scrolling for ages.
When a job is scheduled to you, or moved to a new time, you get a push notification. No more group chat scrambles to confirm the day's plan.
Who this is for
If you run a service business, a freelance operation, or a trades team where more than one person needs to know what is happening this week, the scheduling tab will save you time. It is just as useful for a solo electrician who wants their own week mapped out as it is for a six-person plumbing team coordinating across three vans.
If you already have a system that works, that is fine too. The schedule sits alongside the rest of Jotter, so you can pick it up when you want it.
Rolling out now
The scheduling tab is being switched on for customers in waves. If you do not see it in your portal yet, that is expected. We are turning it on per account as we work through the early users, taking feedback as we go.
If you want it on your account, get in touch via support and we will enable it. There is no extra cost, no separate plan, and no upsell. It is part of Jotter.