The Technician Calendar &
Daily Route View
Learn how to use Upbuoy's calendar and dashboard views to visualize schedules, manage daily routes, and track technician progress in real-time.
Duration
20 minutes
Category
Routes & Scheduling
Part 1: From Schedule to Reality: Understanding Service Stops
In the last module, you created a Route Schedule. That was the permanent, recurring template for a customer's service. Now, we'll see how Upbuoy uses that template to build your daily and weekly to-do lists.
Service Stops: From Template to Reality
The system automatically generates a Service Stop for each scheduled visit. A Service Stop is a single, concrete appointment on a specific date.
📋 Route Schedule
The rule (e.g., "Service John Smith every Monday").
📅 Service Stop
The actual event (e.g., "Service John Smith on Monday, June 10th").
The views in this module are where you interact with these individual Service Stops.
Part 2: The High-Level View: The Technician Calendar
The Technician Calendar gives you a bird's-eye view of your entire operation. It's perfect for long-term planning and understanding workload distribution.
📍 Navigate to the Calendar
From the sidebar, click Routes, then Route Schedule.
🔧 Key Features
📱 View Toggles (Day/Week/Month)
Switch between different calendar layouts to see the level of detail you need.
Month View: Great for spotting busy weeks and planning ahead.
Week View: Shows a column for each day, helping you balance the workload across the week.
Day View: A detailed, hour-by-hour timeline of a single day's appointments.
👥 Technician Filter
Use the dropdown to filter the calendar to show schedules for one, multiple, or all technicians. This helps you focus on a specific person's workload.
🎨 Appointment Blocks
Each colored block represents a scheduled service stop, showing the customer name and time. The color corresponds to the assigned technician, making it easy to see who is assigned where at a glance.
💡 Practical Use Case:
It's the end of the month, and you want to see if next month's routes are balanced. Use the Month view to see if any particular day or week looks unusually heavy. If Wednesday is packed but Thursday is light, you know you might need to move some schedules permanently (which you'd do back on the Route Assignments page).
Part 3: The Daily Action Center: The Routes Dashboard
While the calendar is for planning, the Routes Dashboard is for execution. This is the page your technicians (and you) will use every single day to manage the route.
📍 Navigate to the Dashboard
From the sidebar, click Routes, then Dashboard.
🧩 Components of the Dashboard
📅 Date Navigator
At the top, you can easily move forward or backward day by day, or jump to a specific date.
👨🔧 Technician Cards
A list of all technicians working on the selected day. Each card is a mini-dashboard showing their total stops, completed stops (with a progress bar), and estimated time remaining.
📝 Customer Stops List
This is the most critical part. It shows an ordered list of all service stops for the selected technician(s) for that day. This is their to-do list.
🗺️ Live Map
The interactive map on the right visually plots the stops in their optimized order, helping the technician understand their physical route for the day.
Part 4: Managing the Day in Real-Time
The Routes Dashboard is interactive. It's designed for making the on-the-fly adjustments that are a part of every service day.
🔄 Reordering Stops (Drag & Drop)
Why?
A customer calls and asks to be the first stop of the day. Or, a tech sees traffic on their map and decides to reverse the order of their next two stops.
How?
Simply click and hold the grip icon (<GripVertical />) on a customer stop and drag it up or down in the list. The route numbers and the map will instantly update to reflect the new order.
✏️ Editing a Stop's Details for the Day
Why?
A customer needs their service shifted from the morning to the afternoon, but just for today.
How?
Click the action menu (...) on a stop and select "Edit stop". This opens a modal where you can change the scheduled time or even temporarily reassign that single stop to another technician for the day, without altering the permanent Route Schedule.
⏭️ Skipping a Service Stop
Why?
The gate is locked, or there's an aggressive dog in the yard.
How?
Click the action menu and select "Skip stop". This opens the the skip service interface. You must select a reason (e.g., "Unable to access property"). This marks the stop as "Skipped," removes it from the technician's active queue, and creates a record of why the service couldn't be completed.
✅ Completing a Service Stop
Why?
This is the main job!
How?
Clicking anywhere on the customer stop card will take the technician directly to the Service Completion Page (/routes/stops/[id]/complete). This is where they will enter chemical readings, check off tasks, and add notes. We will cover this page in detail in Module 13.
Key Takeaways
The Technician Calendar is for high-level, long-term planning and workload visualization.
The Routes Dashboard is the daily, real-time command center for technicians and managers.
Changes made on the Route Assignments page (Module 10) are for the permanent, recurring schedule.
Changes made on the Routes Dashboard (like reordering or editing a stop) affect only that specific day's route.
The system is designed to automate the schedule, so you only need to manage the exceptions (like a locked gate or a last-minute change).
Next Steps
You now understand how to plan and manage your routes. The next logical step is to see how Upbuoy helps you create and manage one-time jobs that don't fit into a recurring schedule.
Ready to learn about work orders?
Proceed to Module 12: Creating and Managing Work Orders