How To Use The Scheduler in WorkZen
The Scheduler is your team's shared calendar. It holds three kinds of items, visits, tasks, and reminders, in day, week, month, and timeline views. Drag to reschedule or reassign, click to open, and use Create to add any of the three.
A whiteboard works fine until it doesn't, usually right before a client calls asking where their tech is. The Scheduler is one shared, color-coded view of everything your team has committed to, and it holds more than visits.
Three kinds of items
| Item | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Visit | Scheduled work at a location, with a crew and a status that follows the day | "Furnace install, 9 to 12, Dave + Maria" |
| Task | Internal to-do with an assignee and priority, no client appointment involved | "Pick up condenser from supplier" |
| Reminder | A time-based nudge that notifies you, optionally linked to a job, client, or lead | "Call Mrs. Chen back about the quote" |
Use the Create button in the Scheduler toolbar to add any of the three (an empty day in Month view offers the same menu), and the type filter to view All, Visits, Reminders, or Tasks. Visits carry the schedule; tasks and reminders get their own article: tasks and reminders.
Views
Switch between Day, Week, Month, and Timeline at the top. Day and Week are the dispatch workhorses; Month is for load planning; Timeline lays team members side by side so you can spot who's overloaded and who's free at a glance. Today snaps you back to now, and the team member filter narrows any view to the people you're dispatching. The All tags filter beside it keeps only the visits carrying any of the visit tags you pick, and hovering a visit shows its tags in the preview card.
Day and Week show the hours your company actually works: the visible range follows your work hours (earliest start to latest close across the week), so a 7:00 to 17:30 shop sees 7 to 6, not a generic corporate day. The 24-hour toggle in Scheduler settings still shows the full clock when you need it.
Seeing the whole team requires the View Team Schedule permission; techs without it see their own schedule only.
The schedule on your phone
The mobile app keeps two views: Timeline, the running list of what's coming, and Day, a time grid with an hour axis, a red line at the current time, and every visit, task and reminder placed where it happens; the week strip above it shows a dot per item on each day. Tap an empty slot to create a visit at that time, and press and hold a block to drag it to a new time (you confirm before anything moves, as on the web). Pinch the grid to zoom: spread two fingers to make the hours taller and read a short visit, pinch them together to see the whole day at once. The zoom sticks on that phone.
Drag, drop, and the conflict cop
The Scheduler is direct-manipulation:
- Drag an item to a new time or team member; a confirmation shows the change ("New time", "Team member") before it commits, and you can also unassign from there.
- Drag in Month view too: drop a chip on another day and it moves to that date, keeping its time of day.
- Drag an edge to resize a visit; the Scheduler confirms the new duration before saving.
- Recurring visits ask about scope: moving or reassigning a visit that belongs to a repeating series asks whether the change applies to Only this visit or All future visits, so one exception never silently rewrites the series, and a crew change can roll forward when you want it to.
- Finished visits stay put: a completed, cancelled or no-show visit can't be dragged or resized, on the web or in the apps, until someone reopens it (finished visits are locked).
- Double-booking warning: dropping a visit onto a busy tech pops "This team member already has N visits at that time. Schedule anyway?", so overlaps happen on purpose or not at all.
Dispatch without leaving the calendar
Click any visit and the visit modal opens with one-tap status actions: Let's Go! to dispatch (the On My Way! dialog lets you email and/or text the client that someone is heading out), Start Visit when the tech begins, Complete when it's done (with an optional Client Signature step), plus No Show for the messier days. Statuses update instantly for everyone watching the calendar, so "where's Dave?" gets answered by the screen instead of a group text. The modal's Info, Docs, and Comments tabs show counts at a glance, and the Actions menu can Duplicate visit (opens a new visit prefilled with the same details and crew; pick the new time and save), share, convert, or cancel; on a finished visit, Reopen visit takes the place of edit and cancel. Dispatcher and tech read from the same page. Finished visits also record their actual On Site Time, measured from Start Visit to completion.
The Calendar Sync button in the toolbar feeds all of this into Google, Apple, or Outlook Calendar: set up calendar sync.
See it in action
Frequently Asked Questions
This article answers:
- How do I use the WorkZen calendar?
- How do I reschedule a visit?
- What is the difference between a visit, a task, and a reminder?
- How do I see my whole team's schedule?