How to schedule jobs without double booking

Pick one place where every booking and job lives, and treat anything outside it as not real. Messages and calls become bookings the moment they are agreed, and the booking is entered straight away, while the customer is still on the line.

Leaving out the duration is the commonest cause of clashes, because a slot looks free when it is not.

• The customer and the address
• Start time and how long it will take, including travel
• Who is assigned
• What they need to bring or prepare
• The price or the quote it came from

Add the drive between sites, parking and a small buffer to every slot. A schedule with no slack fails the first time a job overruns.

Before promising a time, look at the person's day and the previous and next jobs. In BusinessPilotOS the calendar shows bookings, jobs and tasks together, with each person's assignments and times shown in their own time zone, so a clash is visible before you confirm.

Spend five minutes checking tomorrow: confirm addresses, move anything that overran and tell customers early if a time has changed. Customers forgive a change they hear about in advance.