Recall that PreScheds create WOs on the first day of each month when PestaRoo is opened on the designated AutoTrigger computer.
Never Delete! – When a customer quits, dies, or even moves away, do NOT delete their PreScheds. Instead, change the PreSched status to “Inactive”. This prevents any PreScheds from ever ‘rising’ but maintains the valuable data that you should keep. For example, if someone new moves into the Location, you might want to have the new owner’s service scheduled to trigger on the same route, week number, and day as the prior customer. This saves you and your tech a lot of time.
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Search for PreScheds in the Past – A PreSched whose Next Trigger month and year are in the past will NEVER fire, which means those PreScheds won’t create their WOs. But almost every user we know has one, or even several, PreScheds with Next Trigger values in the month. Next Trigger fields are searchable. For example, you could find PreScheds set for a status of ‘Active’ and a Month of ‘2’, and Year of ‘2019’. Looking for the prior several months is a good way to find data entry mistakes. PestaRoo automatically does this for you once a day and alerts you at Home Page in the Live Statistics section!
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Review the AutoTrigger PreSched Logs – Go to Home Page >> Preferences >> PreScheds. This is where you can review the PreScheds Logs, Dates, and Counts.
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Review a single PreSched’s history – Go to PreSched Info >> More…>> to view a PreScheds log of WOs created. This log also shows Prices updates if there were changes from the “Update PreSched Prices” system.
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Find all PreScheds for an area or street that you want to include in the same route – From Location List, find all records for that town, street or area. Click on the “Go to Related PreScheds” button (just below the ButtonBar). Viola! You land on the ‘PreSched List’ with all Customers in the associated geographic area. You can now easily adjust the Placement ‘Week’ and ‘Day’ to cluster your Customers into a tighter Route. This is a great technique to reduce windshield time and mileage! Now, read this trick again. It is that valuable.
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Use Existing PreScheds to put WOs in efficient order for a single route – The ‘Start Time’ on the PreSched record automatically passes down to the WO that it creates. So, you could print a list of all PreSched for a Tech for a single Week Number/Day, then have them select the order they prefer, and then put those times into the PreSched records so the WOs always print out in order! To print the list, go to ‘PreSched List’, enter Find Mode and enter desired Tech name, week and number. Perform the Find, then print the list by clicking the Printer icon and selecting ‘Print as List.’
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How to Find the WO and Invoice that a PreSched just created- From PreSched More… see the two fields “Last WO ID” and “Last Inv ID”. You can view each document by clicking the blue triangle beside the ID.
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How to find all the PreScheds that triggered on a specific day – From ‘PreSched More…’ search the desired date in the Logging field. Note that PestaRoo always uses four digits years in Logs. So, to find PreScheds created on Feb 1 of 2019, Go to Find mode and type “2/1/2019” (without the quotes).
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Use “Trigger Single” for new customers – When setting up a new PreSched, you will typically click the ‘Trigger Single’ button to generate the first WO for immediate service. Then you will set the Next Trigger Month and Year fields. Be careful to never set Next Trigger Months and Years with values in the past.
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Manage Re-scheduled WOs – What do you do with a WO that could not be completed due to access or weather? Normally you do NOT want to change the PreSched record since it has probably been set up for servicing along with other nearby jobs. Instead, change the date on the already printed WO, and then the ‘Service Date’ on the Invoice before you post it.
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View WOs created by PreSched System from those entered manually – From ‘Work Order More…’ you can view the ‘Source’ of the WO… ‘PreSched’, ‘Invoice’, or ‘Manual’.
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Raise prices on some or all of your PreScheds – Go to Home Page >> Management >> Update PreSched Prices. This lands on the ‘PreSched Price Updating’ layout where you can find and change sets of PreSched prices quickly. Ideal for use when raising price on multiple PreSched records by a fixed amount or a percentage.