PBJ Dispatch & Appointments 1.0.0 — who is going where, and when
The fourth PBJ CRM module: visits and appointments in one record, a shared V-1 reference run, and an arrival window everybody is quoted.
PBJ Dispatch & Appointments 1.0.0 is out. It is the fourth module for PBJ CRM, alongside Helpdesk, Invoicing and Archive, and it answers the one question the CRM could not: who is going where, and when. $25 one time, per major version, three sites per key.
One record, with a switch
A visit is when you go to the customer. An appointment is when they come to you. Everything else about the two is identical, so there is one form, one list, one detail screen and one number to quote down the phone — and one run of numbers across both kinds: V-1, V-2, V-3. Nobody has to know which kind a booking is before they can look the number up.
You book a time; everybody is told a window
This is the part that stops the phone ringing. Set how wide the arrival window is once — thirty minutes to start with — and every screen quotes that window, centred on the time you picked. Book 2:00pm and the customer is told 1:45 to 2:15. Set the width to zero and everybody is told the exact time instead. One number, set once, and nobody is ever told “sometime Tuesday”.
Where the work happens, written down at the time
The address is copied onto the booking when you make it, not looked up later, so somebody correcting a postcode on Tuesday afternoon does not silently move Monday’s job. Gate codes and “round the back through the yard” sit on the job, where the person driving there will read them.
A screen for 7:40 in the morning
The portal gains a Visits section: Today, Next 14 days, To be booked, and Nobody on it — with one tap to move a job to On the way or On site, and an “I will do it” button on unassigned work in your team. It is a web page, so it works on the phone in the van without anybody installing anything. Contacts and companies get a Visits tab on their profile, and the settings screen lives inside the CRM.
What 1.0.0 does not do
Said plainly, because an overstated release is worse than a modest one. Version 1.0.0 does not:
- send reminder emails or texts — nothing goes out automatically to the customer or the engineer;
- produce calendar (.ics) invites;
- put a map link on a job — the address is there in plain text;
- turn a support ticket into a site visit.
All four are planned phases. They are named as phases rather than implied, and if one of them is your reason for buying, wait for the release that carries it.
Getting it
PBJ Dispatch requires PBJ CRM 1.10.0 or newer and has no standalone mode — without the hub it tells you so rather than half-working. Install and activate the CRM first, then upload pbj-dispatch.zip. Your licence key goes on the plugin’s settings screen so updates reach you; every 1.x update is free.