Setting Technician Availability and Work Hours

Before your dispatchers can effectively assign jobs, FieldPulse needs to understand when each technician is actually available to work. What I typically recommend is treating this as a foundational configuration step — something you revisit quarterly or whenever your team structure changes. Getting this right upfront prevents a lot of scheduling conflicts down the line.

Understanding Technician Availability

In my experience, availability in FieldPulse operates at two levels:

• Work Hours — The recurring schedule that defines when a technician normally works (e.g., Monday–Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM)
• Time Off & Exceptions — Individual days or date ranges where the technician is unavailable, overriding their normal work hours

The dispatch board uses both of these data points to show technicians as available or unavailable for assignment. If you have ever wondered why a technician does not appear in the dropdown for a particular time slot, the answer is almost always found here.

Configuring Work Hours

To set up work hours for a technician:

1. Navigate to Team > Technicians and select the technician you want to configure
2. Click the Availability tab
3. Under Work Hours, click Edit Schedule
4. For each day of the week, set the start and end times. You can also mark days as non-working
5. Click Save Changes

What I typically recommend here is being precise about break times. If your technicians take a mandatory lunch break that you want protected from scheduling, set their work hours in two blocks (e.g., 8:00 AM–12:00 PM and 1:00 PM–5:00 PM) rather than one continuous block. This prevents the dispatch board from suggesting jobs that would overlap with that break window.

You can also configure Service Areas from this screen, which ties into route optimization. I will not cover that in depth here, but it is worth noting that availability and geography work together — a technician might be technically "available" by hours but excluded from a job assignment because the location falls outside their assigned service area.

Managing Time Off and Exceptions

For vacations, sick days, or other absences:

1. From the same Availability tab, scroll to Time Off
2. Click Add Time Off
3. Enter the date range and select a reason (Vacation, Sick Leave, Training, or Other)
4. Optionally add notes visible to administrators
5. Click Save

In my experience, it is better to add time off as soon as it is approved rather than waiting until the week of. Dispatchers appreciate the visibility, and it prevents the awkward situation of assigning a job to someone who is actually going to be out of office.

Time off entries can be recurring — useful for technicians who work a four-day week or have every other Friday off, for example. When you create the entry, toggle Repeat Weekly or Repeat Monthly and define the pattern.

Partial Day Availability

Sometimes a technician is available for part of a day but not the whole day — a doctor appointment, for instance, or a half-day training session. For these scenarios, I have found that the cleanest approach is to use the Exceptions feature rather than trying to manipulate the regular work hours.

To create an exception:

1. In the Availability tab, click Add Exception
2. Select the specific date
3. Choose whether to block the entire day or define custom hours for that day only
4. Save

The exception will override the regular work hours for that date without affecting the underlying weekly schedule.

What Dispatchers See

Once configured, availability appears visually on the Dispatch Board and Team Calendar. Technicians show as:

• Green — Available and within working hours
• Yellow — Available but approaching capacity or outside preferred hours
• Red/Gray — Unavailable (outside work hours, on time off, or at capacity)

If you are using the Route Optimization feature, availability windows are treated as hard constraints — the system will not suggest a route that has a technician starting before their work hours begin or ending after they end.

Bulk Configuration

For teams with standardized schedules, you can save time by copying availability settings from one technician to others:

1. Configure the "template" technician's schedule completely
2. Click Actions > Copy to Other Technicians
3. Select the technicians who should receive these same settings
4. Choose whether to copy work hours, service areas, or both
5. Confirm

What I typically recommend here is using this feature for the initial setup only, then managing exceptions individually. If you keep bulk-copying over individual technicians, you risk overwriting vacation days or special arrangements that someone already entered.

Integration with Mobile App

Technicians can view their own schedule in the FieldPulse Mobile App, though they cannot modify their work hours or time off — those permissions remain with administrators and dispatchers. This prevents confusion from technicians accidentally blocking themselves from assignments.

The mobile app does display time off entries, so technicians know when they are marked unavailable.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

In my experience, here are the situations that come up most often:

Technician shows available but should not be: Check for overlapping time off entries that might have been created twice, or an exception that was set to "Custom Hours" rather than "Unavailable."

Dispatcher cannot assign a job during working hours: Verify the technician's time zone is set correctly. If the technician is in Pacific Time and the dispatcher is in Eastern Time, a 9:00 AM Eastern job falls at 6:00 AM Pacific — outside default work hours.

Recurring time off not applying: Recurring entries have an end date. Check whether the series has expired.

Changes not reflecting immediately: Availability updates sync to the dispatch board within a few minutes, but you may need to refresh your browser to see them.

Related Articles

• Using the Dispatch Board
• Scheduling a Job: Step by Step
• Route Optimization: How It Works
• Managing User Roles and Permissions

If you have questions about configuring availability for complex scenarios — rotating shifts, on-call schedules, or multi-location technicians — my recommendation is to reach out to your implementation contact or open a support ticket. These can usually be accommodated with the right combination of work hours, exceptions, and service area settings.