The best way to setup and track, appointments and calendars, for a maintenance company?

Rakesh June 20, 2019

Hi everyone,
I would really appreciate it if someone can help my setup a system/workflow to manage my new property maintenance company in the most efficient way possible. Currently I use Outlook's basic functionality alone , but it's not perfect and requites a degree of duplication and manual processing.

Essentially, Real Estate agents who we work with call us when problems that occur at the properties they rent, to tenants.

The process follows like this:
1) They email an administrator, a "Works Order" describing the problem and tenants' information, to contact and book in an appointment.

2) The administrator allocates the appointment to an engineer's individual calendar on MS Outlook. This includes a meeting invitation with the property details, and all works to be carried-out, quoted for, or both

3) Sometimes works require 2-3 visits if specialist parts are needed, or complications occur. Currently this is difficult to categorise/track so I simply use custom categories to label the appointment as 'part-complete' on Outlook 

4) Once all works are fully completed, we label the appointment(s) 'completed'

5) On a regular basis, I look through all the 'completed' jobs and send out invoices, via the accounting software package, Xero. After doing this I label each appointment 'Invoiced'

6) Finally, when payment for a job is received, I label it 'paid' in Outlook

Ideally I'd like to:
- Link these appointments together so it's clear when an individual visit is part of a larger series of visits, to complete a job
- Make sure no jobs are categorised in error so that, for example, the status/stage of a job is not incorrectly changed from 'complete' to 'paid'

Could this be used to track jobs from start to finish in a better way than solely using Outlook? Or might it integrate with Outlook and generally minimise duplication and discrepancies between job records? Might it also be possible and/or advantageous to connect these services/apps to Xero too?

Thanks in advance for your help. I really appreciate it.

R.

1 answer

0 votes
Iain Dooley
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June 22, 2019

@Rakesh In terms of linking visits together, you can use this approach I created for subtasking:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/Trello-Subtasks-with-Butler/ba-p/1060392

You can then enable the calendar power up which gives you an iCal feed that will give you an event for any card that has a due date.

As the job moves through each stage, you move the 'master' card to each stage until done.

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