Crew
An intention
A named, persistent team of Workers under a foreman. It is who normally works together, and it is what the scheduler pre-selects so the common case takes one action instead of five.
Crew scheduling
Tomorrow decided once, and visible to everyone.
Assign Workers to Jobs by the day, in the same place the photos and the hours already live. No retyping the plan into a group chat every evening, and no two trucks at the same address.
The group chat is not a schedule
It works right up to the size where it does not. Six people, four addresses, and one change at nine in the evening — and now tomorrow's plan is spread across a thread that two of them have muted. Nobody can answer "where am I supposed to be" without scrolling.
An Assignment is the record that a Worker is expected on a Job on a date. It replaces the message, it survives being scrolled past, and it is the same object the labour cost is attributed against.
Crew and Assignment
An intention and a record are not the same object.
Assignment
A record
One Worker, one Job, one date — what was actually planned. It is authoritative for both the schedule and labour cost attribution, which is why borrowing a worker for a day does not quietly charge the wrong job.
What it does
Assign by the day
One Worker, one Job, one date. That is the unit, because that is the decision an owner actually makes every evening.
Crews as the default
Schedule the whole Crew in one action, then change the two people who are somewhere else tomorrow. The common case is one tap.
Recurring work
Maintenance rounds and repeat visits produce a series of Jobs at the same Site, so the history stays in one place.
Drag and drop board
Move a worker from one job to another by dragging them. The affected people are notified.
Today, for the foreman
Where am I, what Job, who is with me, what is next. One screen, readable at arm’s length in the sun.
Feeds the job costing
Assignments and Time Entries land against the same Job, so the schedule and the labour cost are two views of one record.
Offline
The plan is readable without signal.
Today and this week's Jobs are cached on the device, so a foreman standing in a basement can still see where the crew is meant to be. What is not cached is stated plainly rather than shown as an empty list, because an empty list and "we cannot reach the server" look identical and mean opposite things.
Changing the schedule needs connectivity. Reading it does not.
Questions
- What is the difference between a Crew and an Assignment?
- A Crew is an intention — a named, persistent team under a foreman, used as the default selection when you schedule. An Assignment is the record that a specific Worker is expected on a specific Job on a specific date. The Crew is who normally works together; the Assignment is what actually got planned.
- What happens when I lend a worker to another crew for a day?
- Their labour costs to the Job they actually worked, not to their home Crew. Assignment is authoritative for cost attribution as well as for scheduling, which is the only way the job costing stays honest when crews get shuffled — and they always get shuffled.
- Does recurring work create one job or many?
- Many. Recurring work produces a series of Jobs at the same Site, each with its own start, end, assignments and logged time. A monthly maintenance visit is twelve jobs a year at one property, and the photo history for that property covers all of them.
- Do workers get notified when the plan changes?
- Yes. Changing the schedule notifies the people it affects, so the plan does not depend on anyone re-reading a thread at ten at night.
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