Jobs & the day
The job, start to finish
Every status a job can be in, every button on the job page and what each one sends, and the two different ways a job finishes: on site for junk, at the dump for a rental.
This applies to both workflows
What are the two workflows?A job is one piece of work with a date, an address, a price and a driver. It is the screen you spend your day on, and it is the same screen for both of your workflows: a junk lead becomes a job the moment you book it, and a dumpster booking creates a job for each trip the rental needs. Everything below applies to both, and where the two genuinely differ it says so.
Where jobs come from
Junk work is quoted first: a lead arrives, you talk to the customer, and booking it creates the job. A rental is booked and paid at checkout, and the booking creates a delivery job and a pickup job. If that distinction is new, read Two workflows before this page.
The statuses
A job is always in exactly one status. The list below is the whole set, read from the database rather than typed out, so it cannot fall behind the product.
| Status | What it means | Still on your list? |
|---|---|---|
| Booked | A real job with no date on the calendar yet. A booked job with no date is on hold. | Yes, it is still work |
| Scheduled | It has a date and a time window, so it is on the schedule and counts against your capacity. | Yes, it is still work |
| Dispatched | The crew is on the way. This is the move that texts the customer. | Yes, it is still work |
| In progress | The crew is on site and the clock has started. | Yes, it is still work |
| Completed | The work is done. Nothing has been collected yet. | No, it is over |
| Invoiced | An invoice exists for the work and is waiting to be paid. | No, it is over |
| Paid | The money is recorded against the job. | No, it is over |
| Missed | Its day and your grace period both passed with the job still open. | Yes, in the Missed list |
| Cancelled | Called off. It keeps its reason and stays in the record. | No, it is over |
On hold is not a status
A job Booked with no date is on hold. There is no separate On hold status, because a held job is exactly that: a real job that is not on the calendar. The Jobs list shows it as On hold and tells you how long it has been waiting.
The moves, and what each one sends
The job page offers you the moves that are legal from where the job is now. It will not offer a move it would then refuse. This table is generated from the rule itself, so it is the rule.
| Move | Legal from | What it records | Texts the customer? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Move to Booked | Scheduled | Nothing but the status | No |
| Move to Scheduled | Booked, Dispatched | Nothing but the status | No |
| Move to Dispatched | Booked, Scheduled | Nothing but the status | Yes, the on-the-way text |
| Move to Dispatched | In progress | Clears the start time | No |
| Move to In progress | Dispatched, Missed | Stamps the start time | No |
| Move to In progress | Completed | Clears the finish time, clears the completion time | No |
| Move to Completed | In progress | Stamps the finish time, stamps the completion time | No |
| Put On Hold | Scheduled, Booked, Missed | Clears the date, clears the time window, sets the hold marker | No |
| Close After Trip | Scheduled, Booked, Missed, Dispatched | Stamps the finish time, stamps the completion time | No |
| Close as settled | Invoiced | Nothing but the status | No |
Only one move texts the customer
Moving a job forward to Dispatched sends the on-the-way text. Moving it back from In progress to Dispatched does not re-send it, so correcting a mis-tap never texts the customer twice. Nothing else in the table above sends a message at all.
The buttons you actually press are worded for the moment rather than for the status: Schedule, Start Driving, Mark Arrived, then Collect Payment or Job Completed. On a dumpster trip the same buttons read in the trade's words, so a delivery ends with Dropped rather than a junk phrase. The rollbacks (Back to Scheduled, Back to In Progress and so on) live under the three-dot menu.
Putting a job on hold
Use Put On Hold when the customer wants to move the job but does not yet know to when. It clears the date and the window, takes the job off the calendar and off your capacity, and tells nobody: the customer asked for this. The job stays in your Jobs list, marked On hold with the date it went on hold.
- Give it a date with Set a date and it goes back to Scheduled. The customer is told the new date, using the rescheduled message and never the first-booking confirmation.
- It is offered from Booked, Scheduled and Missed only. A job whose truck is already rolling, or whose work is done, cannot be held.
- It is not offered on a dumpster rental. A rental's delivery and pickup dates belong to its booking, so holding one trip would leave the booking saying something untrue.
A job you did without the app
You did the work, took the money on site, and never touched your phone. Close After Trip in the three-dot menu closes that job in one step. It walks the same chain the normal flow walks, with two deliberate differences: it does not send the on-the-way text, because you are not on the way any more, and it does not invent a start time for work it did not watch. It records your completion time and nothing else.
It appears only once the job's date has arrived or passed. Closing a job before its day is the normal flow's job, not this one.
Cancelling
Cancel Job asks for a reason (customer request, customer no-show, scheduling conflict, weather or safety, duplicate, or other, which needs a note) and then cancels the job, texts the customer, and puts a junk job's lead back where it was. A cancelled job keeps its reason and stays in the record; it is never deleted.
What happens to a paid deposit
That is your cancellation policy, set under Settings > Money > Billing & Payments on the Invoicing tab, not on the job. See Deposits.
Finishing the job
>>> This is the one place the two workflows genuinely behave differently, and it is worth reading both columns even if you only do one of them. <<< A junk job is finished when the truck pulls away. A rental is not finished until the load has been weighed, because until the container is on the scale nobody knows the final price.
Junk removal
is quoted
- 1The crew finishes the work and presses Job Completed (or Collect Payment, which completes the job and opens the payment sheet in one press).
- 2If you require a photo before completion and there is none, you are asked once before it goes through.
- 3The job reaches Completed. You get the in-app alert, and the review request is queued.
- 4Money is collected on site or billed afterwards. See Collecting payment.
Dumpster rental
is booked
- 1On the trip that ends the rental, the final button reads Finish at the Dump, and it does not complete anything yet.
- 2The driver records the pickup on the job: photos, load secured, and the customer is told the container is gone. The job stays open on purpose.
- 3At the scale, the driver enters the weight. The overage over the included tonnage is calculated and confirmed.
- 4Only then does the job reach Completed, and only then do the final receipt and the review request go out.
A mid-rental trip does not end the rental
Completing a delivery, a swap, a dump and return or a relocation still alerts you and still updates the container, but it does not ask the customer for a review, because the customer still has the container. Only the trip that ends the rental does that.
Dumpster trip types
Every dumpster job carries a trip type, shown as a badge on the job and on the schedule. The last column is the one that changes what the buttons do.
| Trip | Badge | What it is | Ends the rental? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Delivery | DEL | Drop off empty dumpster | No |
| Pickup | PU | Pick up full dumpster | Yes |
| Swap | SWAP | Deliver empty and take full | No |
| Dump & Return | D&R | Dump contents and bring back | No |
| Relocate | REL | Move the same dumpster, on-site or to a new address | No |
What else is on the job page
- Line items are the price, edited in place. Add Items scrolls you to them. A job booked online with a price range arrives with a total of $0, and pressing Collect Payment opens the pricing step first rather than dead-ending.
- Photos taken by the crew, before and after. Featuring a pair publishes it to your website gallery. See Photos and your gallery.
- The internal note is yours. It is never shown to the customer and never sent anywhere.
- The SMS thread is the conversation with the customer. Since COMM-06 it also shows the automated texts we sent on your behalf, marked as automatic, so the thread is the whole outbound record rather than half of it.
- The communications log underneath is the audit trail: every templated email and text on this job and its invoices, with what happened to each one. It is collapsed by default.
- Source says which ad or page produced the job, when we know. It renders nothing when we do not.
- Ask for a review appears once the work is finished. See Review requests.
Missed jobs
A Scheduled or Booked job whose day has passed, plus your grace period, is marked Missed and you are alerted. Set the grace period under Settings > Scheduling; setting it to never turns the whole check off. A missed job is not stuck: Resume Job puts it back to In progress, and it can also be held or closed after the trip.
A rental pickup that runs late is never marked missed. The customer kept the container, which is not your failure, and those rentals show up as overdue rentals with the extra days the customer owes. A missed delivery is still a missed job.
Common mistakes
"I pressed Complete on a dumpster pickup and the job is still open."
That is correct, and it is the one thing about rentals that surprises everybody. A rental completes at the dump, not at the kerb, because the weight decides the final price. Enter the scale weight on the job's driver screen and confirm the overage; the job completes then, and that is when the receipt and the review request go out.
"I put a job on hold and the customer got a text."
A hold sends nothing at all. The message you are thinking of goes out when you give the held job a new date -- that is the rescheduled message, and it is deliberate: the customer needs to know the new day.
"I want to mark a job complete but it is still Scheduled and I already left."
Use Close After Trip in the three-dot menu. Walking it forward manually would text the customer that you are on the way to a job you have already done. Close After Trip is the path that skips that text.
"I corrected a status by mistake and now the customer has two on-the-way texts."
They cannot have. Only a forward move to Dispatched sends it. Rolling back and forward again is idempotent for the customer, and the communications log on the job shows you exactly what went out.
"An invoiced job is stuck. There is no way to finish it."
If the work is covered by an invoice that has already been settled, use Close as settled on the job. It moves the job to Paid without recording a second payment, and it refuses if the money is not actually in. If the balance is genuinely still owed, collect it instead.
"The job page shows six texts but I know we sent more than that."
Open the Communications section below the thread. The thread shows the conversation; the communications log shows every templated email and text on the job and its invoices, including ones sent automatically.