As you may know, we started SortScape from Sydney, Australia. Naturally our first customers are all located here on the east coast of Australia so SortScape assumed that everyone was located in the Sydney / Melbourne time zone.
Recently, however, we’ve been hearing from business owners in the United States and Canada who want help running their maintenance businesses more efficiently. (Evidently the world is much bigger than this little strip of coastline in the UTC+10:00 timezone.) Naturally we want to help them out we’ve just added the ability to custom your site’s time zone.
Now you can use SortScape no matter where your business is located. To update the time zone on your SortScape site, follow our online documentation.
By popular demand, we’re introducing a major new feature I was initially hesitant to add … monthly schedule view.
Why I was hesitant
When designing SortScape, we modeled it off the weekly scheduling whiteboards seen at our customers’ offices. Scheduling whiteboards are simple and great for visibility but terrible for “update-ability” and portability. SortScape takes the simplicity of the weekly whiteboard and makes it easy to update and accessible from anywhere. The last thing I wanted to do is lose this simplicity by adding unnecessary features like (I thought) the monthly view!
SortScape takes the simplicity of a whiteboard and adds automation and portability.
“Why a monthly view?” I thought. The landscape maintenance business is so dynamic that it’s almost impossible to accurately schedule jobs months in advance. Certainly the schedule will change somewhere along the line due to sick employees, bad weather or extra work.
How I was convinced
But by talking to customers, we’ve come to learn that you value the predictability and visibility that SortScape gives you and you want even more visibility … You want to know how much business you have scheduled this month, next month and the month after that. You need to know how many staff to hire or what open slots you can fit new customers into. All of that requires you to have a 30k-foot, monthly view of your schedule, even if it’s likely to change in the future. That’s why we built the monthly schedule view.
The monthly schedule view gives you a 30k-foot view of all your upcoming jobs
Not your typical calendar
The monthly schedule view displays jobs in a more compact format than the weekly and daily views. It shows just the street address and nothing else…no suburb, contact info or related issues. (Clicking on the job will give you all that info.) You can drag and drop jobs across days just like you can in the day and week views. And if you want to add a new job, simply click on a day in the monthly view and SortScape walks you through the rest.
A unique aspect of the monthly view is the statistics feature. Click on the statistics icon to view key stats for the month like how many hours of work are scheduled and whether you have enough employee hours available to do the work. This can help you with your long term planning and hiring.
Click on the statistics icon to view key stats for the month
Give it a try!
The monthly schedule view is now available for all customers. So if you’d like to get a 30k-foot view of your upcoming jobs, click on the “month” button. And don’t forget to tell us what you think in the comments below.
