Scheduling the First Job
Step 4 of the full-page estimate is where a quote becomes a booked job. It gives you four different ways to find a time, plus a manual option, so you can pick the approach that matches how the customer is thinking.
There's a guided tutorial for this inside Pulse. Open an estimate and click the book icon in the top bar. It walks all four estimate steps and then goes deep on the scheduling tabs — steps you haven't unlocked yet are skipped automatically, so it works on a blank estimate or a filled-in one. For the full tab walkthrough, run it from Step 4.
Who Can Access This
| Role | What they can do |
|---|---|
| Administrator | Full access to all four tabs and booking |
| Office | Booking and every tab except RPP |
| Sales | Full access to all four tabs and booking |
The Availability and RPP tabs also depend on how your scopes are configured. RPP also needs the Revenue Production Planning report, which is turned on for your company and included in the Administrator and Sales roles. See Troubleshooting below.
Before You Start
Scheduling stays locked until these are true:
- You've completed Profile and Pricing.
- A scope you picked has a frequency selected.
- The address is complete and its ZIP code is in your service area, or you answered the Home Zone question on the Booking step. A saved home picked in the Home picker already counts.
Until then the step shows a message explaining what's missing, and hovering the locked step lists it too. On a phone, the first locked step's list shows under the step buttons. This is deliberate — Pulse can't suggest sensible times until it knows how often the job repeats and how long it takes.
How Long Is the Job?
This trips people up more than anything else on this screen, so it's worth stating plainly:
The slot length you see is the job's allowed man-hours divided by the team size.
A job with 6 allowed man-hours scheduled for a 2-technician team shows up as a 3-hour slot, not a 6-hour one. Man-hours are the total labor; the slot is the wall-clock time the team is actually on site.
The man-hours used here are the first job's exact hours, including every add-on you selected on the Pricing step. The slot is those hours divided by the team size, rounded to the hundredth of an hour, with no rounding up to the quarter hour. For example, 2h 21m (2.35 hours) for a 2-technician team is a 1.18-hour slot, about 71 minutes. A first-visit-only adjustment such as First Time In makes the first slot longer than the recurring visits will be.
If a job is longer than 8 hours for a single team, Pulse automatically searches for slots at half that length, on the assumption you'll split it across two teams. If that still finds nothing, it tries a third. When this happens you'll see an amber banner telling you so, so the empty-looking results aren't a mystery.
One-Time vs Recurring
The frequency you picked in Pricing changes two things.
Which tab opens first. Pulse opens the tab most likely to be useful for that frequency:
| Frequency | Opens on |
|---|---|
| Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly | Master Schedule |
| One-time, tri-weekly, other recurring | Schedule Timeline |
Recurring work benefits from fitting the existing rotation, so Master Schedule leads. A one-time job never repeats, so the rotation is irrelevant and Schedule Timeline — real open gaps — leads instead.
All four tabs are still available either way. If you'd rather work a different tab, just click it.
What gets created when you book. See What Happens When You Book below.
The Four Tabs
Master Schedule
Use it for recurring work.
Master Schedule suggests slots that fit the rotation your teams already run, so the new customer lands on a day and team that is already working their area. Each suggestion is a card with a score, a breakdown of why it scored that way, and a mini preview of that team's day.
Suggestions are ranked mostly by how well the slot fits existing routes. In rough order of influence:
- Master schedule fit — does this team already work this rotation slot, and are they already serving this customer's area that day? This single combined factor drives most of the score.
- Availability — is there genuinely room left in the day?
- Customer preference — does it match the day or time the customer asked for?
- Zone compatibility — does this team historically serve this zone at all?
- Primary team — a small nudge toward the customer's usual team.
A day where the team has nothing scheduled yet isn't marked down for having no nearby jobs, and its open hours count in its favor under Availability.
If Customer Preference under Advanced Settings is set to First Available, the cards are listed by earliest date, then earliest start time, instead of by score. The score is still shown on each card.
Tap a card's score to see the exact breakdown behind it, or the info icon next to the tab for the weight each factor carries.
Pulse looks ahead eight weeks — two full four-week cycles — and only weekdays. Slots where the team has no real capacity are removed entirely rather than shown with a low score, so an empty list means "nothing fits," not "nothing scored well."
Capacity is checked against the frequency. A weekly job needs room in all four weeks of the cycle. A bi-weekly job needs room in either weeks 1 and 3, or weeks 2 and 4. A monthly or one-time job only needs room in the week you're targeting.
Schedule Timeline
Use it for one-time work, or when you need a specific date.
Instead of the rotation, this tab shows genuine open gaps in each team's day over a seven-day window, ranked by fit. In order of influence:
- Technicians actually available during the slot. This is by far the biggest factor — a slot on a day the team works but where nobody is free during that window is pushed to the bottom.
- Zone match with the surrounding jobs.
- Large gaps of three hours or more, and morning starts, each a small bonus.
Two controls sit above the list:
- Team filter — include or exclude specific teams from the search.
- Sort — order by score or by date.
Where a job runs right up to the start of a gap, a drive-time buffer is added before the suggested start — 15 minutes within the same zone, 30 minutes across zones. If the gap is too short once that buffer is applied, it isn't offered at all.
Why is the Schedule Timeline empty?
Only technicians with the Scheduled tag and an available schedule on those dates appear. When nobody qualifies, the tab says No technicians are scheduled on these dates. Check each technician's tags and schedule.
Availability
Labelled Capacity on small screens. Use it to answer "which week has room?"
A four-week capacity grid for the scope group, showing your goal, what's used, and what's left for each day. An overbooked day shows a negative amount, such as -3.5h: how far it is over its goal. Hover over it to see the same amount labeled Over by. Use the grid to steer the customer toward a week that isn't already full before you commit to a specific day.
Each day's color counts the job you're booking. A day turns full when this job's hours (or price, for revenue-based scope groups) won't fit in what's left. The hours counted are the visit's man-hours to the hundredth of an hour, add-ons included, not rounded up to the quarter hour. For a recurring job, a day is also full when the second visit won't fit on its own day, such as one week later for a weekly job. Hover over the day to see Next visit: … is full. The Goal, Used, and Available amounts still show the day as it is today, without this job.
Clicking a day sets it as the manual date. If this job doesn't fit that day, or its next visit doesn't fit, Pulse warns you rather than silently letting you overbook.
To see why a day is full or open, select it and click the View … details button under the grid; the button names the day in your date format, such as View Tue, 6/16/2026 details. Pulse opens the day's breakdown: how much of the goal is used, the goal, what is booked and what is left. When the job you're booking is why the day is full, the status says so underneath: Full for this job, or Next visit: … is full for a recurring job. Where pooled capacity is turned on for your company and your role includes View Availability Capacity, it also lists the day's jobs and the employees scheduled. Closing it takes you back to booking with the day still selected. See Availability Calendar for what each figure means.
Which day did I pick on the Availability tab?
The day you picked is filled in your company's brand color (blue by default) so you can find it at a glance, and today has a thin outline in the same color. The first day of each month shows the month name, such as Nov 1.
RPP
Use it to balance workload across teams.
RPP (Revenue Production Planning) shows utilization for the next 14 days broken down by team — allowed hours against scheduled hours and revenue. Reach for it when the question is "which team needs the work?" rather than "where's the next opening?"
Clicking a cell sets both the date and the team.
Does booking use the lead's preferred days and start time?
Yes. When a lead has Preferred Days or a Start Time and End Time saved in the Edit Lead drawer, booking opens Step 4 with that preference applied. On Master Schedule, suggestions on those days that start inside that window are listed first, and the rest follow by score. The preference shows as a Preferred Days (or Time Priority) chip under Advanced Settings, and the saved days and window show under Customer Preference — for example, "Lead prefers Tue, Thu · start 9:00 AM–12:00 PM". Clear it to rank by score alone. A lead whose days are marked as excluded days is not treated as a preference. Schedule Timeline does not use the saved preference.
Manual Schedule
Below the tabs, on every tab, is the Manual Schedule panel. Expand it to set an exact date, time, and team yourself.
Use it when the customer has already agreed a specific time, or when none of the suggestions work. Once you pick a date, Pulse offers context-aware suggestions for teams and times available on that day. You can also assign multiple teams to a single job here.
Book a second scope earlier than its starting date
When a quote has more than one scope, Pulse starts each scope after the first on the next date that fits its frequency after the previous scope's date. That is a starting point, not a limit: in Manual Schedule you can pick any date from today on.
What Happens When You Book
Save Quote saves the quote without booking anything. Save Quote & Book creates the customer, their home, the service set, and the job (or jobs) together in one step.
What gets created depends on the frequency:
| One-time scope | Recurring scope | |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs created | A single job | Jobs generated across the next year |
| Rotation | Kept out of rotation, so a later reschedule won't remove it | Part of the normal rotation |
| First Time In | Not applied by default | Applied to the first job only |
| Add-ons | All selected add-ons apply to that job | "First visit only" add-ons apply to job 1; "every visit" add-ons apply ongoing |
If a quote has both one-time and recurring scopes, the one-time work only affects the first-job price — it never appears in the recurring total.
Other Recurring books the first visit only. Booking from the estimate doesn't set a repeat pattern, so a scope priced as Other Recurring gets one job, and the Scheduling step tells you so before you book. To repeat it, open the service in the Property & Service Manager after booking and use Change Frequency to set a Custom Recurrence Pattern. See Custom Recurring Schedules.
Why can't I book this quote?
Pulse books a quote only once. If Save Quote & Book shows This quote is already booked, the quote was booked already, maybe in another tab or by a coworker. Nothing new was created. Open the customer to add or change service.
Why does Pulse show a day as full when MaidCentral V2 shows it open?
Pulse checks the visit you are booking and, for a recurring job, its next visit too. A day is full when the first visit doesn't fit that day, or when the second visit doesn't fit on its own day, such as one week later for a weekly job. MaidCentral V2 checks only the chosen day, using the recurring visit's hours, so Pulse can mark a day full that V2 offers. (Pulse reference D-19)
Tips and Best Practices
- Trust the ranking before overriding it. A high-scoring slot usually means the team is already nearby that day, which protects your drive time and your margins.
- Check Availability before promising a week. It's much easier to steer a customer to a week with room than to unpick an overbooked day later.
- Watch for the long-job banner. If you see the amber "too long for a single team" message, decide deliberately whether to split across teams rather than forcing a single-team slot.
- Use Manual Schedule for customer-driven times, not to avoid the tabs. If the customer genuinely asked for Tuesday at 9, set it. If you're going manual because the suggestions look empty, check your team filters first.
Troubleshooting
| What you see | Solution |
|---|---|
| The Scheduling step is locked | Add a frequency to at least one scope in Pricing. Contact info and pricing must also be complete. |
| No suggestions at all on Master Schedule | Usually a missing or out-of-area ZIP code on Profile, or no master schedule data for your teams yet. Check the ZIP first, then confirm your teams have a master schedule set up. |
| Empty results with an amber banner | The job is longer than 8 hours for one team. Pulse is showing you shorter slots for a multi-team split — pick one and assign a second team, or reduce the job's hours. |
| Only two tabs are showing | Availability and RPP only appear when the selected scope belongs to a scope group. Ask your administrator to check the scope's configuration. |
| The RPP tab is missing but Availability shows | Your role doesn't include the Revenue Production Planning report. Administrator and Sales have it. |
| RPP tab shows "Failed to load capacity data" | The Revenue Production Planning report isn't enabled for your company. Ask your administrator to enable it, or use the Availability tab instead. |
| Availability says No Goal Set on every day | Read the note above the calendar. Usually no technician has the Scheduled tag and one of the scope group's Applicable Skills, or none is scheduled on those dates. You can also enter Hour Goals on the scope group. |
| Schedule Timeline says no technicians are scheduled | Only technicians with the Scheduled tag and an available schedule on those dates appear. Check each technician's tags and schedule. |
| A day I picked warns that it doesn't have room for this job, or that the next visit doesn't fit | You can still book it, but you're overbooking that day (or the next visit's day). Consider a nearby day with room, or confirm with your scheduler first. |
| A day with time left shows as full | Its color counts the job you're booking. The job is longer, or priced higher, than what's left, or its next recurring visit doesn't fit. Hover over the day for details. |
| Booking a lead doesn't list its preferred days first | Matching days list first only when a team has room on them in the next eight weeks. Check the lead's Preferred Days in Edit Lead, and check under Advanced Settings that the Preferred Days chip is still set. |
| Booking says This quote is already booked | The quote was booked already, maybe in another tab. Open the customer to add or change service. |