Before you start
This guide picks up after the six-step getting started flow has been completed. You should have a workspace created, your business profile filled in, and at least one customer in the system. If you have not done that yet, start there and come back.
Have ready: the email addresses of everyone you want to invite, a rough sense of which crews each person will belong to, and the service areas (zip codes or radius) each crew will cover. Forty-five minutes is enough to walk this end to end without rushing.
Step 1. Invite teammates
Open Settings, Team, then Invite teammate. Enter each person's email, pick a role from the dropdown, and send the invitation. The invitee receives a passwordless magic-link email within a minute. Clicking the link signs them in directly to the workspace in their assigned role.
You can invite as many teammates as you need. Office users (owners, dispatchers, bookkeepers, admins, anyone you assign a non-field role) are unmetered. Only crew seats count against the plan.
Step 2. Assign roles
Simple Scheduler ships six default roles: owner, dispatcher, crew lead, crew member, bookkeeper, and office. Each carries a permission set tuned for that staffing pattern. For most operations the defaults are exactly right. If you need a different shape (a regional manager role, a compliance officer role, a part-time dispatcher with limited access), open Settings, Team, Roles and create a custom role with the exact permissions you want.
Step 3. Build crews
Open Settings, Crews, then New crew. Name the crew, pick a crew lead, add crew members, and define the service area (zip codes or radius from a home base). Most operators end up with one crew per truck, but the platform does not enforce that pattern. Solo operators run as a single-member crew. Multi-tech crews work the same way: one crew, multiple members.
The crew lead is the person who owns the day from the field side: they can reshuffle their own crew's stops, message customers, and mark visits complete. Crew members default to a more limited surface: their own assigned visits, the customer information for those visits, and the actions needed to complete the work.
Step 4. Crew capacity rules
Each crew carries two rules that govern how Simple Scheduler treats their day. The first is daily capacity in hours, the total billable hours the crew can absorb before the booking widget stops offering new slots. The second is the per-visit buffer, a planned gap between stops to cover paperwork, drive time variance, and the time it takes to walk back to the truck.
Conservative defaults work for most teams. Set capacity to the actual billable hours your crew typically delivers (often 5.5 to 6.5 hours on a nominal 8-hour day after drive time and breaks). Set the buffer to 10 to 20 minutes depending on your trade. Both numbers can be adjusted later as you observe how the day actually runs.
Step 5. Availability and time-off
Teammates request time off from their own profile in the app. Managers approve requests from Settings, Team, Time off. Approved time-off removes the affected crew from the booking widget for those dates and surfaces a notice on the dispatch board so the office can backfill or shift visits in advance.
For predictable absences (every other Friday off, every Wednesday morning) set them as recurring availability rules on the teammate's profile. The system respects the rules forever without anyone resubmitting them.
Step 6. Test the dispatch flow
Create a sample visit on the calendar and assign it to one of your new crews. On the assigned crew lead's phone, open the crew app and verify they see the visit. Walk through marking on-the-way, marking arrived, capturing a test photo, and marking complete. The visit should turn green on the calendar in seconds, and any test customer reminders should fire to the addresses you set on the test customer record.
If everything lands as expected, your team is ready for production dispatch. If anything does not work the way you expected, the most common cause is a role permission set tighter than the workflow needs. Check Settings, Team, Roles and adjust.
Common gotchas
- Magic link in spam. First-time invitations occasionally land in spam. Ask invitees to check, or resend from Settings, Team. Subsequent emails almost always deliver to the inbox.
- Crew with no service area. A crew without a service area defined will not appear in routing or the booking widget. Set at least one zip code or a radius.
- Time-off without approval. Time-off requests block the booking widget only after approval. If a teammate is taking time off without office approval, the calendar will keep offering their slots until you approve the request.
- Crew lead vs crew member confusion. Crew leads can reshuffle their crew's day; crew members cannot. If a teammate complains they cannot move a visit, check their role.
Where to get help
If you get stuck on any step, email support from the contact page. We answer every support email within one business day, and the knowledge base linked from every settings page covers the deeper how-to questions.