Operations settings
A walk through Settings, Operations: service generation, missed stops, routing, GPS, time clock, shared truck iPads, hiring, cost rates, territories, job recipes and regulatory forms.
3:54 · Settings · Getting set up
Transcript
Before a truck rolls, a handful of company rules decide what lands on the board, who gets told when a stop is missed, and how hours turn into payroll. Those rules live in one group of settings. Open Settings and find the Operations group. We'll go through it top to bottom. Routing comes first, and it carries the most. Scheduled service generation turns every rate card service plan into real jobs, every night and whenever a rate card is saved. Here they're created seven days ahead, unassigned, ready for dispatch. Preview run shows what would be created without writing anything. Run now does it for the whole company on the spot. Missed stops decides what happens when a stop isn't completed by the end of its day. PortaPro can send one report listing every miss and the reason the driver gave. The report stays off until you turn it on, so a company still loading its book isn't flooded on day one. Capacity-aware routing estimates gallons pumped at every stop and drops in a dump stop before the waste tank fills. Set the gallons per unit and how full the tank gets before it heads to dump. Set a lunch window, and the optimizer gives every driver a break inside it. Depots are where your trucks start and end their routes, like your yard, each with a real address on the map, so drive time and mileage come out right. They're a separate list from the Facilities page, which routing never reads. Real-time driver location reports a position from the driver app while a driver is actively navigating, never when the app is closed. Route optimization features switch individual pieces on or off, like splitting very long routes, or texting customers their arrival window when a route is dispatched. GPS Tracking is where you order plug-in trackers for your trucks, picked from your own vehicle list. Already running Samsara, Geotab or Motive? Connect it here instead. PortaPro only reads positions, and never writes anything back. A speed alert is off by default. Turn it on and you hear about it the first time a truck goes over your limit, at most once an hour. Further down, every tracker's activity and alerts are listed, like a device going offline or a battery running low. On Time Clock, turn the clock on for the company, and choose when a shift someone forgot to end closes itself. Pay periods set how timesheets are grouped for approval. Here it's every two weeks, starting Monday, with hours kept exact. Overtime thresholds sort hours into regular and overtime. PortaPro never applies a pay rate. Wages stay in your payroll system. Shared Devices is for crews who share one iPad per truck. The truck stays signed in, and each driver signs on with a PIN, so every stop is credited to the right person. A truck's login is invited from Team Management like any driver. There are none yet in this company. Hiring controls your public careers page, and whether people can apply when no specific opening fits. Applications include driving history, so dispatchers can't see them unless you switch this on. Below that are the emails applicants get: the confirmation, the not moving forward note, and the welcome for a new hire. Route Plan Cost Rates are your best guesses for labor, mileage and fuel. Route Plan uses them to estimate what each route costs to run. The driver labor rate is a costing number for profitability reports. It's never anyone's actual pay. Service Territories split your area by boundary or ZIP code, with the drivers, service days and target stops for each one. Dispatch paints them on the map. Job Recipes list the supplies each job type uses, like paper, deodorizer and sanitizer on a delivery. PortaPro counts on them to plan what each truck needs to carry. And Regulatory Forms holds your county's own PDF forms. Place the fields once, and every job fills in the customer, the site and the gallons pumped for you.
More in Getting set up
- Importing your customersPaste a list in any format, check what PortaPro found, and import. Every import can be undone.1:28
- Getting around PortaProWhat the dashboard tells you each morning, and the fastest ways to reach any screen.1:29
- Inviting your teamInvite drivers, dispatchers, mechanics and admins, and choose what each one can see.0:48
- Setting up a site's rate cardTell PortaPro what's at a site, how often it's serviced and what it costs. Service jobs and cycle invoices follow from it.1:18