Smart scheduling: field service by skill and travel time

What do you need to schedule technicians in stipt?

Scheduling revolves around three things: agendas, lanes and appointment types. An agenda is one planning, for example Installation crew or Advisors, with its own colour and settings. Every member on that agenda gets their own lane in the timeline, optionally with a line name such as Van 1 or Team North. An appointment type is a kind of appointment, such as a 60‑minute intake or an installation, with a default duration and a colour.

An admin creates agendas and appointment types under Settings > Agenda; the Agenda module is on by default. You connect employees to their agenda through the member settings. Every appointment is attached to a record, the record of a customer or project in the CRM part of stipt. In the CRM settings, switch on the Appointments block for the record type you want to plan; from then on those records are plannable and the appointments also show on the record.

How do you record when technicians are available?

Every member has a standard week: the fixed working days and hours. The office sets it in the member's planning profile, which also opens when you click a lane's name in the agenda. The same profile holds the start address, work area, skills and the appointment types they do. Absence, such as holidays, and extra open time, a Saturday for example, can be set there by the office too; the technician can also set those in the portal.

Smart planning never offers anything outside working hours or during a block; on an extra open day it does. If you plan manually outside those times, the agenda warns you first and you decide whether to go ahead. The timeline always matches who is actually available, without you keeping days off in a separate list.

How do you plan a job on the timeline?

The Agenda page shows a timeline per agenda with a lane per employee, in a day or week view. Records that are ready to plan sit in the Plan sidebar, longest waiting first. Click a job and it is in your hand; then click a free moment and check the member and time. On save, the status of the record changes along automatically. For door‑to‑door or walk‑in work there is the Plan a new customer wizard, enabled per agenda: one screen creates the customer and the appointment together.

While you hold a job, stipt helps you choose: employees who do not match the required skills or work area fade out and sink to the bottom. If you still drop the job on such a member, a warning says what is missing, and also when the drive from the previous appointment does not fit; you stay in control and can schedule it anyway. Hover over an employee to see their working hours, start address, email address and phone number.

How do you get the right technician on the right job?

stipt can take into account who can do which work and where someone works. You switch both requirements on per appointment type, on the Assignment tab; they are off by default.

Per employee you record in their planning profile which skills they have and in which area they work. For every job stipt looks at what it requires and where the customer lives, and only lets employees qualify who fit. Only the office sets this up; the technician does not see it in the portal.

If one technician works faster or slower than another, you set that on their profile. All of this applies to manual planning and to smart planning alike.

How does automatic scheduling with travel time work?

Besides manual planning, stipt can compute the best moments itself. With smart planning the customer receives a booking link with a handful of options, computed live from availability and real travel times, plus skills and work area if you switched those requirements on. A job naturally lands on a moment when a suitable technician is nearby and the route stays efficient. You send the invite manually from the record, automatically on a status change, or through a rule in Studio.

Everything about smart planning sits on one page: Settings > Agenda, Smart planning tab. Per appointment type you set what the customer gets to choose from and how far ahead. Per agenda you add a travel preference, and with planning rules you capture your own agreements, such as installations only in the morning.

What the booking page looks like for the customer and what happens after booking is covered in the customer self‑scheduling guide.

How do you plan follow‑up appointments, like a survey and then the installation?

A lot of field work is a chain: first a survey, then the installation. In stipt you link appointment types together for this, on the Smart planning page in the Follow‑up appointment block. There you set which appointment follows which, how much time has to sit in between and whether the same technician comes back.

The customer can pick the follow‑up right after the first appointment, in the same screen. You can also send the follow‑up invite separately later. That way the installation never lands too soon after the survey and nobody has to guard the chain by hand.

Which emails go out to the customer automatically?

Every appointment has a status: Scheduled, On the way, In progress or Done, Did not go ahead, or Cancelled. The technician reports On the way, starting the visit and Did not go ahead from the portal. In Studio, on the email templates, you attach an email to those moments with a trigger, plus an optional reminder at a fixed time before the appointment. No email on a moment means nothing goes out; you decide exactly what the customer receives. When scheduling or rescheduling, the Confirmation email block lets you choose which email goes out now, or none.

On top of that, per appointment type you map each appointment status to a status change of the record. Schedule an appointment or let the technician finish it and the record moves through your workflow by itself, so the whole team sees where a job stands without double entry.

How do you reschedule or cancel an appointment?

You reschedule with the move button on the appointment block, or by opening the appointment and choosing Move. The appointment then hangs on your cursor; you can browse to another day or week and click a free moment. You decide along the way whether the customer gets an email. From the appointment you can also resend the confirmation to the customer.

Cancelling goes through Actions > Cancel appointment. You choose whether the customer gets an email, or cancel without an email, for example for a booking the customer never saw. Cancelling requires a short reason and Did not go ahead asks for a fixed reason, such as customer not home, so you can see later why a visit did not happen.