How to schedule jobs in the diary

Most trades plan the week in some mix of a paper diary, the phone's notes app and memory — and it works right up until a job overruns, a customer cancels, or you double-book a Tuesday. The jobs diary gives every booking a time and a place, so the week is something you can see rather than something you're holding in your head.

This tutorial covers booking jobs into the diary, moving them when plans change, switching between week and month views, and the small habits — like ordering the day by postcode — that save an hour of driving a week.

1. 1. Open the Diary

   From the main menu, open the Diary. You'll see your bookings laid out by day — each job showing the customer, the address and the time slot you've given it. Jobs you've created without a date sit outside the diary until you book them in, so nothing gets lost just because it isn't scheduled yet.

   The TradePlanr diary in week view with several jobs booked across the working week

2. 2. Book a job into a slot

   Tap a day and time to create a booking, or open an existing job and give it a date and time. Pick the customer, set roughly how long you expect the work to take, and the job appears in the diary as a block — so you can see at a glance how full the day is before you promise someone "Thursday morning".

   You don't need the timings to be precise. A boiler service might be an hour, a rewire might block out three days — the diary handles both, and a rough block you can move beats a perfect plan you can't.

   Creating a new booking with a customer, date and time slot selected

   Tip

   Give every job a little more time than you think it needs. A diary with breathing room survives the real world; a back-to-back one collapses at the first snagged isolator valve.

3. 3. Move jobs when the plan changes

   Plans change — a part doesn't arrive, a customer asks to push back, an emergency callout jumps the queue. Open the job and change its date or time, and the diary updates straight away. There's no crossing out, and no risk of the old time surviving on a scrap of paper somewhere.

   If a whole day falls apart, work through it job by job: move what can move, and let the customers know. Pair the diary with SMS appointment reminders and rebooked customers get the new time confirmed to their phone automatically.

4. 4. Switch between week and month views

   The week view is for running the next few days; the month view is for answering "when can you fit us in?". Flick to the month to spot the gaps two or three weeks out, offer the customer a date, and book it there and then — no "I'll check the diary and call you back".

   The diary's month view showing busy days and open gaps across the next few weeks

5. 5. Order the day to cut the driving

   When you've got three or four jobs in a day, the order matters as much as the jobs themselves. Glance at the addresses and arrange the day so you sweep across your patch once rather than criss-crossing it — first job furthest out and work back, or cluster by postcode.

   It sounds obvious, but it's the thing a paper diary never shows you: seeing the day's addresses together is what makes the wasted miles visible.

   Tip

   Booking "morning" and "afternoon" slots instead of exact times gives you room to reorder a day by location without breaking a promise to anyone.

6. 6. Handle overruns without wrecking the week

   When a job overruns, deal with the diary before you deal with the panic. Stretch the job's block to what it actually needs, see what it collides with, and move or rebook the affected jobs — a two-minute shuffle in the diary instead of an evening of apologetic phone calls you've been putting off.

   Because every job keeps its notes, photos and customer details when it moves, a rebooked job turns up next week with everything intact.

Ten minutes with the diary on a Sunday evening — or in the van before the first job — and the week stops being a guessing game. Once the team can see the same diary (next tutorial), it stops being a guessing game for everyone else too.