Weekly work is the easiest revenue to keep and the easiest to lose. Customers who see your truck every Tuesday stay for years, until the week the truck doesn’t come. Good weekly service routes are boring on purpose: the same customer on the same day, in an order that makes sense on a map, with enough slack that one long stop doesn’t wreck the afternoon.
Start with areas and days
Before you think about software, put your weekly customers on a map and split them into areas you can drive in a day. Then give each area a day of the week. A route that zigzags across town on Monday and covers the same streets again on Thursday costs you hours of driving every week, forever.
- Keep each day’s area tight enough that the drive between stops is shorter than the work.
- Leave one lighter day for catch-up: rain, a sick technician or a new customer.
- Put new customers on the day their area is already served, even if they asked for another day.
Every other week without confusion
Every-other-week customers are where weekly routes usually break. Half of them are on “A weeks” and half on “B weeks,” and nobody remembers which is which after a holiday. The fix is to anchor each one to a start date and count from there, so the pattern never depends on memory. Then balance your A and B weeks so neither is twice as heavy as the other.
How weekly jobs work in Sentra Scheduler
A recurring job can now run weekly or every 2 weeks, alongside monthly, quarterly and the rest. Three things are different from monthly jobs:
- The months are a season. Leave all twelve picked for year-round work like pools or offices, or pick March to November for mowing. Visits only come due in the weeks whose Monday falls in those months.
- Every 2 weeks counts from the week the job starts. The pattern is fixed by the job’s start date, so it doesn’t drift when someone opens a different month or a holiday gets in the way.
- Each visit is due within its week. A weekly visit is due Monday to Sunday of its week, shown as “Week of Oct 19,” and waits in the schedule’s tray until someone puts it on a day. If the customer expects a particular day, set a preferred day on the job.
The numbers that follow
A weekly job is priced on about 52 visits a year and every 2 weeks on about 26, prorated by the season: a March-to-November mowing job comes to about 39 weekly visits. That is the number the job’s annual value uses, so a customer’s yearly worth is visible the moment you save the job.
The forecast counts every visit in every month, so a weekly job adds four or five visits’ worth of hours to a month, not one. That matters when you’re deciding whether the summer needs another crew. See crew capacity planning for how to read it.
Put the week on the schedule
Each Monday the week’s visits are waiting. Drag them onto crews and technicians on the schedule; Sentra Scheduler leaves time for the drive between stops, plans around breaks and flags conflicts. Routes by day on dispatch follow the schedule, and you can rearrange a route’s stops if the order needs a tweak. Customers can get an arrival window and a reminder email the day before.
Changing a weekly job
Customers move. When a weekly job changes, from every week to every other week, a new season or a new crew, untouched future visits follow the job and visits already scheduled or worked on are kept and flagged for the office. A job switched from monthly to weekly drops its untouched monthly visits and gets weekly ones.
What to watch each week
Even a steady route needs a few minutes of attention every Monday. Look for three things before the crews leave:
- Days that run long. Each lane shows the work booked against the hours available, with the driving included, so an overloaded Wednesday is obvious before anyone starts it.
- Visits left in the tray. A weekly visit that wasn’t placed by midweek is a missed customer by Sunday. The tray groups what’s due this week so nothing hides.
- Promises at risk. When a move would start a visit outside the arrival window a customer was told, the card says so, and the office can call first.
Technicians can subscribe their phone’s calendar to their own visits, so a route change on Monday shows up on their calendar without a phone call. That small step removes a surprising number of “I didn’t know I had that stop” mornings.
A steady week
Weekly service routes stay steady when areas map to days, every-other-week customers are anchored to a start date, and the week’s visits are always the same list in the same order. Set the job up once; let the visits come due; spend Monday morning on the exceptions instead of rebuilding the week. For more on fitting drive time into the day, read drive time between jobs.