Crew Scheduling
Crew scheduling for mulching and land clearing crews
The shop whiteboard, on every phone. Put people on jobs by the day, see the whole week at once, and put the hands who have no app account on the board by name. It is a dispatch sheet for a crew of three to fifteen, not an hourly calendar built for a plumbing route.
Why scheduling a clearing crew is its own problem
Two or three jobs running, a couple of machines, and a roster that changes when somebody picks up a day hand. The tools built for eight-stop service routes solve a different problem, and the whiteboard solves this one right up until you leave the shop.
The whiteboard is in the shop and you are not
The magnet board on the shop wall works right up until somebody calls at 6:40 in the morning asking where to go. Then it is three texts and a phone call, and whoever answers is going off what the board said yesterday. A board only one person can see is a bottleneck with a marker tray.
Dispatch calendars are built for eight stops a day
Field service software schedules by the hour because a plumber runs six calls before lunch. A mulching crew has two or three jobs going and a person is on one of them all day. Hourly slots make you fill in start times nobody reads, and the thing you actually wanted on screen, who is on what tomorrow, ends up buried under them.
Half the crew does not have an account
The two hands you picked up for the week and the sub running his own machine on Thursday are not getting app logins for a nine-day stretch. A scheduling tool that only knows employees leaves them off the board. A board that is missing three people is wrong, and a board that is wrong sends everybody back to texting.
The plan and the timesheet are two different records
What you planned Monday and what happened Wednesday are never the same. Treating the plan as the record is how a rained-out Tuesday ends up on a paycheck. Plan on the board, log hours after the fact, and let the payroll number come from what people actually worked.
How the schedule works
A day board for the morning, a week roster for planning, and a name field for everybody who does not have a login. It is on web, iPhone, and Android, and it works with no signal.
Day board: who is on every job today
One screen, one day. Every active job gets a row with its status, its address, the people on it, and the equipment on it. Jobs with nobody on them still get a row, so a job you forgot to staff shows up as a gap instead of disappearing. A line at the bottom lists everyone who is not on anything yet. This is the default view on a phone, because a phone is answering one question: who is where today.
Week roster: a crew on a job for a week in one save
People down the side, Monday to Sunday across the top, job chips in the cells. Flip it around to read the week by job instead of by person. Tap an empty cell to put that person on a job that day. In the assign sheet, pick the people, pick the job, tap Mon to Fri, and save once. If somebody is already on that job one of those days it says so and skips that day, rather than throwing an error at the end.
Day laborers and subs go on the board by name
Type a name and that person is on the board. No invite, no login, no roster to keep current. Names you used recently come back as chips you tap, so a repeat hand is one tap instead of a retype. The same names are there in the labor hours log, so the person you scheduled Tuesday is the person you log Wednesday, spelled the same both times.
The morning email tells the crew where to go
A weekday morning email goes out before the day starts. Crew get the jobs they are on, with today assignments marked and sorted to the top. Owners get the whole company plus equipment. Nobody has to open an app to find out where to be, which matters for the operator who only opens it when he has to.
Anyone on the crew can move a magnet
Scheduling is not an approval workflow. Any active user can put a person on a job or take them off, the same way anybody in the shop can move a magnet on the wall. Taking somebody off is one tap with an Undo underneath it, not a confirm dialog, because you will do it forty times in a week and a modal in front of it would be forty interruptions.
Works with no signal, like the rest of it
The board lives on the phone. Put somebody on a job with no bars and it saves, then syncs when you get back to coverage. That matters because the place you most want to check tomorrow is usually the place with no service. The jobs list carries the count too: each job shows how many people are on it today.
What the schedule is not
Worth knowing before you switch anything over. If you need the things below, this is not the tool for that part of your week and we would rather you found out here than a month in.
- No times and no hours. A person is on a job for a day or they are not.
- No time slots, no online booking, no route optimization, no month calendar.
- Not a timeclock. Nobody clocks in or out, and there is nothing to punch.
- No approval step. Nothing to submit, nothing to sign off, nothing to reject.
- Not payroll. Hours go in the labor log and export to CSV; payroll runs where it already runs.
What the schedule does do is sit next to the rest of the job. The same job carries the bid it was won on, the daily logs of hours, fuel, and teeth, the shared notepad with the gate code in it, and the profit number at the end. Scheduling is one line in that, not the reason to buy it.
Common questions about crew scheduling
Does MulchDeck have a dispatch calendar?
It has a day board and a week roster, not an hourly dispatch calendar. You put a person on a job for a day. There are no start times, no time slots, no online booking, and no route optimization. If you dispatch by the hour and route trucks between six stops, keep the tool you already have for that. If you are running two or three jobs and want to know who is on which one tomorrow, the board is the whole answer.
Can I schedule someone who does not have an app account?
Yes. Type the name and they are on the board. Day laborers, a sub running his own machine, a neighbor helping for a week: none of them need an invite or a login, and there is no employee list to maintain. Names you have used recently come back as chips you tap. The same names are available when you log labor hours, so the plan and the timesheet spell people the same way.
Can one person be on two jobs the same day?
Yes. Split days are normal in clearing work: a morning on the corridor and an afternoon on the residential lot. The board shows that person twice, once on each job. Nothing stops it and there is no warning to click through.
Does the schedule work without cell signal?
Yes. The board is on the phone, not on a server you have to reach. You can put people on jobs, take them off, and read tomorrow while standing in a hole with no bars, and it syncs when you are back in coverage. The recently used name chips read the phone copy too, so they work down there as well.
Does the schedule track hours worked?
No, on purpose. The schedule is the plan. Labor hours are the record: one entry per person per job per work day, logged after the work happened, with the same free-form names for people who have no account. Those hours feed job profitability, and an owner can export any date range to CSV. Keeping the two apart is what stops a rained-out Tuesday from turning into a paid one.
Who is allowed to change the schedule?
Anyone active on the company. Scheduling is moving a magnet on the wall, so there is no owner gate on it. Logging hours for somebody other than yourself is owner only, which is a different question: one is a plan, the other is a statement about work that already happened.
What is the difference between the Crew and Schedule sections on a job?
Crew is the roster: who belongs to this job at all, open-ended, from the day you put them on until you take them off. Schedule is the day board: who shows up on a named day. Somebody can be on the crew and not scheduled this week, and somebody can be scheduled for one Thursday without ever joining the crew. Both sit on the job page and neither is computed from the other.
Get the board off the shop wall
$149/month flat. Unlimited users, so the whole crew sees the board. 14-day free trial. No credit card to start.
Free tools for costing a crew:
MulchDeck for other use cases:
If you dispatch by the hour, read the comparison first: