Why is RDO better than a spreadsheet for organizing work?
Excel keeps records. RDO organizes.
Excel is a popular way for service teams to keep track of jobs, but building the schedule, planning routes and arranging appointments with customers still falls to the dispatcher. With ten to twenty technicians and dozens of visits a day, this quickly gets complicated and can mean hours of extra work every day. The comparison below shows point by point which tasks RDO takes off your hands, from planning the daily schedule to evaluating completed jobs.
Point by point
What you need to organize in a typical week, and how it goes with a spreadsheet and with RDO.
| What do you need to organize? | Spreadsheet + phone | RDO |
|---|---|---|
| Daily routes | You arrange the addresses in order and estimate travel time yourself. | Plans technicians’ routes based on travel time and job duration. |
| Schedule changes | You edit the list and check that it works for everyone. | Find a new appointment, or assign the job to another technician in one click. |
| One valid schedule | Several versions circulate by email and message, and it is not always clear which one is current. | There is one schedule, and everyone sees the same thing. |
| Job requirements | You separately keep track of who has the skills and when the customer is available. | Record the required skills and the customer’s available time windows on the job. |
| The technician’s daily plan | A spreadsheet that is hard to read on a phone, or a printed list. | A personalized daily plan on their phone, with the route and customer details. |
| Who sees what | Anyone who gets the file sees every customer’s details. | Technicians see only their own jobs and the details they need for them. |
| New requests | They arrive by phone, email and message, and have to be copied over by hand. | Customers submit their request online, and every request arrives in one place for the dispatcher. |
| Appointment coordination | You call the customer, then copy the appointment into the spreadsheet. | The customer uses a link to choose from appointments that fit the schedule. |
| Double booking | The spreadsheet does not warn you when two customers end up in the same slot. | With online booking, slots that are already taken cannot be chosen. |
| Group outreach | You filter customers, write to each one and track the replies by hand. | One send-out per zone, and bookings go into the schedule automatically. |
| Recurring maintenance | You watch the dates and add the tasks again. | Tasks are created automatically from the maintenance intervals. |
| Documentation and invoicing | You look through several files for customer and completed-job details. | Equipment details, job documents and the invoice are accessible from one place. |
| Forms, warranty documents, work sheets | You type the information in separately or scan the paper documents. | Manage them as editable PDFs in the system. |
| Plan and reality | The plan shows how things looked in the morning; nobody updates it afterwards. | Recorded arrivals and working times show how the day really went. |
| Job profitability | You only find out at the end of the year, if at all, which job made a loss. | Every completed job shows its planned and actual result, based on working time, hourly rates, materials and invoices. |
Get to know RDO in a demo
Bring your current spreadsheet, and we will show you what it would look like in RDO
In a 20-minute demo, we start with your own tasks: review your technicians' schedules, routes and appointment options for customers. RDO's founder leads the demo, so you can discuss your questions directly.