Many lawn and garden businesses assign repeating visits to the same "team" or "crew" each time so they can provide consistent service and build a sense of ownership among staff. SortScape helps support this practice with its "Crews" feature.
The "Crews" feature allows you to automatically assign visits to a crew so that you spend less time arranging your schedule each day. If there are any visits due for a crew on a given day, SortScape will automatically create a job run for that crew and add those visits to the job run.
Below is an example of job runs for 3 different Crews.
Naming your crews
Typically, a crew represents a group of one or more employees. In the example above, the crews are named by number (e.g. Crew #1, Crew #2, etc) but every business has different naming conventions so feel free to use whatever names make sense to you and your staff.
Here are some some examples of different naming strategies that have proven effective for our customers:
Existing Names: If the crew already has a name, then use that. For example, "Team Blue", "Team Red".
Type of Work: You can also name them by the type of work they do. For instance, "Lawns 1", "Lawns 2", "Gardening".
Vehicle Identifier: You can also use the name or number plate of a vehicle.
It is generally not recommended to name crews by location or service type. To group visits by location or service type, you can use visit tags.
We also don't recommend naming crews after employees. We have found that this can create issues in the long term if other employees take over that crew. A better way is to assign employees to that crew instead and stick with a name like "Crew 1".
Adding a new crew
You can create new crews when creating a new job run. This allows you to easily assign a crew to a job run at the same time you're setting up the job run.
Assigning a crew to visits
When adding or editing a visit, you can specify the crew for that visit so that it's automatically assigned to that crew on the schedule. If it's a repeating visit, all future visits will get assigned to that crew as well.
You can also update the crew for a visit through drag-and-drop. If you drag a repeating visit to a different crew on the schedule, SortScape will display a prompt at the bottom of the screen asking if you want to "apply to all future visits."
If you click this button, all future visits for that series will then get assigned to the new crew as well.
Renaming a crew
If you need to rename a crew, you can do so by simply clicking the action ("...") drop-down for the job run and then editing the crew. This flexibility allows you to adjust your crew names as your operational needs evolve.
Managing existing crews
On the Visits > Crews screen, you can
rename a crew
change the colour for a crew
assign employees to a crew
You can also see which crews are still in use, delete them if they are obsolete, or merge them if there are duplicates. Regularly reviewing and updating your crew list will ensure that your crew assignments remain relevant and effective.
Important: Only delete a crew if it is truly obsolete. Deleting a crew is not a way to remove that crew from one day, one recurring day, or one job run.
What happens when you delete a crew?
Deleting a crew does not delete the job runs or visits themselves, but it does remove the crew assignment from every past and future job run and visit that used that crew.
When you delete a crew:
All past and future job runs that used the crew become No Crew job runs.
All visits that were assigned to the crew become unassigned from that crew, including future repeating visits.
Employees assigned to the crew are removed from that crew.
Any empty job runs for that crew may be removed.
There is no automatic undo for deleting a crew. If you still use the crew on other days, do not delete it. If you are trying to swap a crew on a recurring job run, follow the steps in Changing the crew on an existing jobrun below instead.
Adding employees to crews
You can add employees to crews so that the employees automatically get scheduled with the crews.
To add employees to a crew, you can edit the crew either via the "..." drop down on the job run or via the Visits > Crews screen.
When you add employees to a crew, they will be instantly scheduled on that crew's future job runs.
If the user had set themselves as unavailable in the roster on a given day (for example, if they are on annual leave, sick, etc), then they wouldn't get automatically scheduled for those days.
If you remove a user from a crew, then they will be instantly removed from that crew's future job runs.
A user can only be added to one crew.
Changing the crew on an existing jobrun
Right now there is no way to automatically change the crew for an existing jobrun in one click. If you want to change a recurring jobrun to a different crew going forward, move the visits into a new job run and apply the change to future visits.
Create a new jobrun on the same day using the crew you want.
Drag the visits from the current jobrun into the new jobrun.
When the prompt appears at the bottom of the screen, click Apply to all future visits in this series. This is the step that makes the change carry forward to future weeks.
After all visits have been moved, the old jobrun should be empty. You can delete that empty jobrun if you no longer need it, but do not delete the crew if that crew is still used on other days.
If you only want to change one day, move the visits without applying the change to future visits. If you want the new crew to be used every week, you must apply the change to future visits.
Migrating to crews
Older subscriptions of SortScape might not have the crew feature enabled yet. To have it enabled for you, please contact SortScape support.
Once enabled, follow these steps to migrate your existing job runs over to crews:
Create crews as it suits your business, following the naming advice above
Once the crews are created, you can create job runs for each crew on the day.
Move the visits from the "No Crew" job runs over to the job runs with a crew and remember to click the "Apply to all future visits in this series" button at the bottom of the screen.
Once you've done this for all repeating visits, SortScape will automatically create the right job runs in the future, and there shouldn't be any more "No Crew" job runs.