SolarCleaningBossPro Blog — Routes & Scheduling

The Dispatcher Morning Checklist for a Solar Cleaning Route Day

In a small solar cleaning company, the dispatcher is often the owner, sitting in the truck with a coffee before the first roof. In a bigger one, it is someone in the office. Either way, the first fifteen minutes of the day decide how smoothly the rest goes. A short checklist, done the same way every morning, catches most problems before the crew finds them at a gate.

The Customer Is Watching Too

Customers can now see their stop number on a live route map, as covered in The Customer Route View: Showing Homeowners Their Stop Number on the Solar Cleaning Route. That makes the morning check more important: whatever order the route is in when the day starts is what customers will watch all day.

The routes themselves should be built the day before, so night-before reminders go out. The morning is for checking and adjusting, not building.

1. Check the Weather

Look at the forecast for the hours the crew will be working, not just the morning. Wind picking up at noon, a shower at two, or a very hot afternoon all change the plan. If roofs are risky later in the day, move steep and tall roofs to the top of the route order and plan to swap afternoon roofs for ground mounts or carports, or move them to another day.

The safety call is the owner's and the crew's. When in doubt, move the job.

2. Read Overnight Replies

Night-before reminders bring replies. Read every one in the two-way texting inbox before the trucks leave. Look for:

• Customers asking to move or cancel.
• New gate codes, new dogs, or changes to where the spigot is.
• Requests to add extras like bird proofing or an inspection.

Move cancelled jobs off today, update access notes on the address so the tech sees them, and note extras on the job so the office can add the line item.

3. Look at Each Truck's Day

Open the dispatch board and filter to each truck in turn. For each one, check:

• The right tech is on the right truck.
• The route order makes sense, with hard roofs early.
• The day is sized by real work, using the panel details under each stop.
• Any time requests or commercial site hours are in the right place.

If a cancellation left a hole, fill it now. More on that in Filling Gaps in the Solar Cleaning Schedule: Pulling Due Jobs Into Open Slots.

4. Handle Yesterday's Skips

Every skip from yesterday came back with the tech's note. Go through them. A locked gate may just need a text to the customer and a spot on the next area day. A skip for bad weather needs a new day. A skip because the job was bigger than expected may need the panel details updated on the address so every future visit is sized right.

Do not let skips sit. A skipped recurring customer whose cleaning slides past the 7-day grace shows as overdue on the Waiting List, and that is a customer who is waiting on you.

5. Glance at the Waiting List

Take thirty seconds with the Waiting List map. Are there overdue pins clustered somewhere? Is a neighborhood building up due work that should get a truck later this week? This is not the time to build routes, but it tells you where tomorrow and the next day should go.

Check for new requests too. Website requests, sign-ups and service requests from the customer app may have come in overnight. Convert sign-ups into clients, send any estimates that need sending, and make sure new one-time jobs are on the Waiting List where they will be picked up with their neighbors.

6. Watch the Trucks Roll

Once the crews log in with the company login and their PINs and clock in on the time clock, crew GPS shows them on the office map. When the first tech taps Start, the first customer can get an automatic text. From here, the office mostly watches: replies come in, skips come back with notes, and same-day requests get placed on the nearest truck.

Make It a Habit

None of these steps is hard. The value is in doing all of them, every morning, in the same order. After a few weeks it takes ten minutes and saves hours of calls and return trips. For the full routing toolkit, visit the SolarCleaningBossPro solar cleaning route software page.