PetGroomBossPro Blog — Repeat Appointments

Pending Jobs: Where Repeat Grooming Visits Wait Until the Office Confirms Them

Every repeat grooming visit in PetGroomBossPro spends some time on one screen before it reaches the groomer's phone. That screen is Pending Jobs. If you run the office for a mobile grooming business, it is the screen you will open every afternoon, so it is worth knowing well.

Where Pending Jobs Fits

How visits get there in the first place is explained in Every Visit Written Up Front: How a Recurring Grooming Series Is Created. Once a series is saved, its visits wait on Pending Jobs with their planned day, time and van.

Pending Jobs is the space between “planned” and “scheduled.” Planned means the visit exists and knows when it is supposed to happen. Scheduled means the office has confirmed it, it is on the Scheduled list for that day, and it shows on the groomer's phone in route order with its set time.

What You See on the Screen

Pending Jobs has two views of the same work, side by side:

• A map with a pin for each pending visit or request, so you can see where tomorrow's work sits around town.
• A list of the same visits, with the client, address, planned time, van, service and pets.

Across the top are day tabs. Tomorrow comes first, because the office schedules the day before. Later days follow, so you can look ahead when you need to. There is also a No Day tab for new requests that do not have a slot yet.

Two Kinds of Work on One Screen

Pending Jobs holds both your repeat visits and your new requests, which is exactly what the office needs when building a day.

Planned repeat visits already have a day, time and van from their series. Most days, they make up the bulk of tomorrow.

New requests come from the online booking page, the website request form, the customer app or a phone call. A booking from the online booking page arrives in Leads with the service, pets, frequency, add-ons, preferred day and time of day and quoted price; once you turn it into a job, it waits on the No Day tab until the office picks a day, time and van for it.

Seeing both together, on a map, makes it easy to fit a new request next to a repeat client who is already in that neighborhood.

The map is also where gaps become obvious. If tomorrow's pins for Van 1 are all on the east side except one lonely request across town, you know right away that request belongs on a different day or a different van.

Confirming

The main action on Pending Jobs is confirming. On tomorrow's tab, one click keeps each visit's planned day, time and van and moves it to the Scheduled list. That is the normal path for repeat clients: nothing has changed, so you confirm them exactly as planned.

If something has changed, you handle that visit differently. Move it to another van because a groomer is out. Move it to another day because the client asked. Leave it pending while you wait for a text back. The rest of the day can still be confirmed. The day-before routine is laid out step by step in Confirming Tomorrow's Repeat Grooming Visits the Day Before.

Why Not Skip the Waiting Step?

It is fair to ask why repeat visits wait at all, when they already know their day and time. The answer is that the day before is when you know things the series could not. A van with a flat tire. A groomer with a sick kid. A client who will be out of town. A heat wave that has you shifting everything earlier.

Confirming is the office's moment to catch those things while it is still easy to fix them. With one click for everything that is fine, it costs very little time, and it means the groomer's phone in the morning shows a day somebody actually looked at.

After Confirming

Once confirmed, the visits are on the Scheduled list for that day. From there the office can filter by van, auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the shop, or set the route order by hand, and print route sheets if anyone wants paper. Customers get the alerts they chose, starting with the night-before reminder.

In the morning, each groomer logs in with the company login and their PIN and sees the day in order, with set times, pets, cut notes, add-ons and van notes on every card.

For the rest of the repeat appointment tools, from the Recurring Clients list to price changes, head back to the PetGroomBossPro recurring grooming software page.