DispatchDesk Docs

The Planner: forward planning for the dispatch desk

Last updated: July 26, 2026

The Planner tab sits between Schedule and Unassigned. In one line: the Schedule looks back at the day; the Planner looks ahead at the fortnight. Technicians are rows, the coming 14 days are columns, and every planned ticket is a chip on its technician + day — colour-coded by workflow phase, ordered chronologically within the day.

Where a chip lands: date precedence

Placement follows the same date logic as the rest of the app, in this order:

1. Drag-drop placement — a chip you've dragged to a day stays there (the override).
2. The mapped Scheduled Date field — if configured under Field Mappings.
3. The due date — Jira's standard field, as fallback.

Capacity bars

Each technician/day cell shows booked estimate-hours against the working day, configured under Settings → Schedule → "Working day (hours)" (1–24, default 8). The math is deliberately honest: tickets without an estimate are counted at the default duration, and any day containing one is flagged with ~ — so a percentage never looks more certain than it is.

Absences on the grid

Days a technician is marked on holiday or sick render shaded, and work planned onto an absent day gets a ⚠ marker. A ✎ pencil next to each technician's name opens the same holiday/sick picker as the Team view, right in the grid — the dispatcher who hears "Marc's out next week" while looking at next week records it in two clicks, and the shading, ⚠ markers and the Today conflicts card update instantly.

The "Planning conflicts ahead" card on the Today dashboard aggregates these markers: the count of tickets planned on days their assigned technician is absent, over the next two weeks. It counts explicitly marked absences only (holiday / sick / unavailable set in the Team view or from the grid). Weekends are ordinary plannable days — field service works Saturdays often enough that DispatchDesk deliberately has no opinion about the working week.

Drag semantics

• Drag a chip to another day, another technician, or both — one confirmation dialog names exactly what changes.
• Dropping on the Unassigned row returns the ticket to the pool.
• The in-flight lock applies here like everywhere: a ticket that's Travelling or On Site can't be silently reassigned — pause it first.
• With the optional "Sync status with assignment" setting on, drags that assign or unassign also advance or return the workflow status — exactly like Board and Unassigned assignment, with the same guards (only the planned ↔ assigned hand-off; never in-flight or paused work). When your Jira workflow blocks the move, an honest toast says so.

The backlog strip

A minimizable strip above the grid lists open tickets with no planned date at all. Drag one onto a technician + day to assign and date it in a single confirmed drop — the "dispatch the inbox" motion.

Navigation and filters

The grid is forward-only: it starts today and navigates by week ("Prev/Next week", "Today", or a jump-to-date picker that refuses past dates — the Schedule owns the past). The same technician/group filter as Board and Schedule applies.

Planner vs. Jira's calendar

Jira's calendar shows issues on dates. The Planner shows people over days: rows are technicians, so capacity, absence, and "who has room on Thursday?" are first-class questions a date-grid calendar can't answer. They're complementary — keep the calendar for date views; plan your crew in DispatchDesk.