Controlling Planner Status, Visibility, and Capacity

Use booking status deliberately

Every scheduled item can carry a booking status.

Use Do not move sparingly. It blocks movement previews so planners have to make a deliberate decision before changing a locked visit.

Only Confirmed and Do not move can enter the Ready pipeline. Provisional and Date offered keep the visit in planning even when it already has an engineer and exact time.

Put planning demand into buckets

Planning buckets hold work that needs a lane but not necessarily an engineer yet.

1. Use bucket lanes for planning groups such as reactive work, access-dependent work, or work waiting for a specialist team.
2. Keep work with no scheduled date in the Work queue.
3. Use the Dated work lane, subtitled Needs an engineer, for dated work that has not been assigned to a field resource yet.
4. Drag bucketed work onto an engineer lane when it is ready for direct assignment.
5. Archive buckets only after active references have been cleared or moved.

Bucketed work appears in the Scheduling Forecast view as bucketed demand, which helps separate capacity pressure from named-engineer assignment.

Control engineer visibility

1. Open a job in the Planner quick view drawer or Bulk Update drawer.
2. Set Visible from when engineers should not see the job before a specific time.
3. Set Visible until when the job should stop being visible after a specific time.
4. Save the planner change.

The visibility window must be valid. Visible until cannot be before Visible from.

Engineer visibility is separate from deployment. A job still needs the usual deployment readiness before it becomes trusted field work.

Record customer appointment notifications

1. Open a scheduled item in the Planner quick view drawer.
2. Confirm the job has an exact scheduled date.
3. Set booking status to Date offered or Confirmed.
4. Confirm the customer email.
5. Choose appointment confirmed, appointment changed, or appointment reminder.
6. Select Notify customer.
7. Review notification history in the quick-view panel.

Customer notifications are recorded only for exact-dated work with a customer email and an offered or confirmed booking status. Target-month work is not a customer appointment.

Preview bulk changes before applying

1. Select one or more scheduler jobs.
2. Click Bulk edit.
3. Turn on only the fields you intend to change.
4. Click Preview Changes.
5. Review valid, warned, and blocked counts.
6. Read blocked-job reasons and warnings.
7. Review route suggestions when the selected work overlaps route clusters.
8. Apply only when there are no blocked jobs.

Bulk preview blocks deployed jobs, locked Do not move movement, and deployment blockers. It also warns when the updated plan still carries non-blocking warnings.

Use Forecast before the pressure becomes urgent

1. Open Scheduling and switch to Forecast.
2. Review the 12-month planning window.
3. Check forecast jobs, estimated hours, unassigned work, and utilisation.
4. Use the monthly table to open the matching Scheduling date range.
5. Use service-line, region, and site load lists to spot concentrated pressure.

Forecast reads inspections, work orders, and planner tasks by booked date or target month across every accessible site. It does not inherit planner filters. It works best when planners use target months for known future demand instead of forcing every job onto an arbitrary date.

Troubleshooting

Related guides

1. Use Scheduler Quickstart for the planner workflow, deployment, and day-run controls.
2. Use the Forecast view in Views and Navigation for capacity forecast detail.
3. Use Bulk Operations and Deployment for deployment-specific behavior.