Originally, SortScape was designed without start and end times for visits, allowing for quick and flexible job shuffling to accommodate staffing and weather changes. This is ideal if your customers are flexible about when the work gets done, as long as the job is completed. This is called the Classic Schedule.
However, if your business requires more structured scheduling—for instance, to handle specific time requests from clients, coordinate visits with material deliveries, or plan around your own availability—you may need a more defined calendar. This is called the Calendar Schedule.
That's why SortScape offers the option to add start and end times to visits. You can also switch to a traditional calendar view with time slots to better visualize your schedule.
Enabling the Calendar Schedule
You can enable the calendar view and the ability to add start and end times to visit, by turning it on in Administration > Visits screen:
Make sure you are logged in via the web browser (you cannot enable this feature from the mobile app)
Go to the Administration > Visits screen which you can access from the "Cog" dropdown in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
Click on "Advanced Settings"
Turn on "Enable calendar view"
Start and end times in the Classic Schedule
The start and end times in the classic schedule are automatically calculated using your day's start time, the visit's preset duration, and travel time, eliminating manual entry. As you complete jobs and use the visit timer, the system updates estimates with actual times. To view estimated times, open the route optimisation tool, add a start time and address, and see the estimated times above the visits: grey for estimated times and green for actual times.
Start and end times in the Calendar Schedule
When creating or editing visits, you can enter a start and end time for the visit. To turn a visit with a start and end time into an anytime visit, you just check the "Any time" checkbox.
When some of your visits are anytime visits and some have a start and end time, you are effectively creating two visit lists for the day, as the list of anytime visits is ordered by position and the list of timed visits is ordered by start time.
Calendar Schedule Views
When looking at this day in a calendar, anytime visits will be shown at the top (at this stage they can only be re-ordered in the original views) and the visits with times will show in the corresponding calendar timeslots.
You can switch to the calendar view by selecting the the calendar day, week or month view from the view drop-down:
A video showing the differences between the Classic Schedule and the Calendar Schedule can be found here:
Route Optimization
At this stage, the route optimization only works for anytime visits, as optimizing a day with visits that have fixed times means the route optimization will have to change those times to suit the ideal route, which defeats the purpose of adding specific times for jobs.