Field Service
Dispatch & route optimization
Turn recurring service plans and one-off jobs into efficient day routes for your field techs — built on top of Cartoply's core scheduling.
What Dispatch is
Dispatch is a paid add-on for field-service teams that run recurring work — think lawn care, pest control, pool service, cleaning, or inspections. On top of Cartoply's core scheduling, it adds internal job types, a light customer CRM, recurring service plans, and a route optimizer that fills each tech's day using real road drive-times.
It's priced per tech seat, billed separately from your core Cartoply subscription and at its own rate, with 20% off on annual billing. You choose how many seats to buy, and only members you mark as techs consume one. Dispatch has its own 14-day trial, and trials and comped accounts are uncapped. See the pricing page for the current rate, or your Billing page for your total.
Service types
Service types are private, internal job types — unlike public event types, they aren't exposed on any booking link. Each one defines how a kind of job is scheduled:
- Start-time window — an earliest and latest start time the optimizer must place the visit within.
- Default duration — how long the job takes on-site.
- Buffers — padding before and after so back-to-back jobs stay realistic.
You might create service types like “Weekly mow,” “Quarterly pest treatment,” or “Pool cleaning.”
Customers & sites
Dispatch includes a light CRM for the people you serve. Each service customer has a geocoded service address (with apartment or unit detail), free-form notes, the plans they're on, and their upcoming and past job history. The customer list is searchable and paginated so it scales as your book of business grows.
Service plans & one-time jobs
Service plans are recurring by cadence only — weekly, every N weeks, monthly, or every N months. A plan doesn't pin a fixed day or time. Instead, Cartoply tracks the frequency and generates a visit that's due within each cadence period, then lets the optimizer decide exactly when to slot it.
One-time jobs drop a standalone visit into the queue without a recurring plan. Attach it to an existing customer and site, or type a fresh address — Cartoply creates a customer record for it automatically.
Techs & seat licenses
Your Techs pool is the set of members who perform service visits, managed on the Techs tab of the Dispatch dashboard. Tick a member to make them a tech; each tech occupies one purchased license. Invite new people from the org's Members page first, then add them here.
As an admin you decide how many licenses to buy, and can change the count at any time — adjustments are prorated. Trials and comped accounts aren't capped by seat count.
A tech is only routable once they have weekday availability and a home base. Without both, the optimizer has nothing to plan around and will skip them.
Home base
Each tech has a home-base (depot) address — the place their day starts and ends. The optimizer measures each day's driving from this point, so routes reflect where a tech actually leaves from rather than assuming everyone starts from the same spot.
Tech territories
Service territories are a separate zone library from the sales territories used for public booking routing. Dispatch only sends a visit to a tech whose service territory covers the job's address. A tech with no territory assigned can go anywhere. If you've already drawn sales zones, you can copy them into the service library rather than redrawing.
Running dispatch
When you run the optimizer, Cartoply fills each tech's day by choosing both the day (within the plan's cadence window) and the time (within the service type's start-time window) that minimize total driving — while respecting work hours, buffers, existing appointments, and territories. It uses real road drive-times and a heuristic that works well for a handful of techs per day.
- Trigger a dispatch run for the day (or days) you want to plan.
- Cartoply produces proposals — nothing is committed yet.
- Review the proposed routes on a road-following route map, checking the order and drive between stops.
- Commit the routes to your techs' calendars, where they become real bookings.
Results are always proposals you review first — Dispatch never auto-books without you. Because the optimizer is heuristic, it produces strong, practical routes rather than a provably-optimal solution.
Completing jobs
Techs work their day from a My Jobs page — their route for the day with tap-to-call and map links for each stop. Completion is two-step: a tech Confirms a job, then marks it Complete when the work is done. Admins can also mark jobs from the dispatch board.
Every visit records who updated it and when, so there's a clean audit trail of what was confirmed and completed.