In some circumstances it will make sense for CrewCal to read a calendar that you’re going to have to manually enter in the details for after it’s scheduled. For example:

In HouseCall Pro you cannot have a 3rd party enter in workorder information (yet… maybe someday?) or schedule jobs from outside of their software. You can, however export their calendar to be viewed in Google Calendar.

That means that if you follow this video in setting up your crews inside of CrewCal you’ll be able to let ResponsiBid/CrewCal read the calendar and then after you (or your customer) schedule a job, you’ll need to go into your CRM to build the workorder/schedule the job. This way, at least your customers can schedule themselves from a proposal, and you’ll get all the assistance from CrewCal you need for scheduling as an admin… and hopefully someday your CRM provider will open up an API connection that ResponsiBid can connect to!

Another point (NOT NOTED IN THE VIDEO) is that in the advanced options you will have the ability to use “AND” or “OR” statements. Here’s an example:

  1. Using the “AND Function”:  What that means is that if you want an event to be read by CrewCal as an event for Crew 1 only if the words “window cleaning” AND the words “gutter cleaning” are contained in the description (as opposed to an exact match of “window cleaning gutter cleaning” without any separation) you could simply use 2 ampersands to tell CrewCal that’s what you want. Just indicate that the description must contain: window cleaning && gutter cleaning.
  2. Using the “OR Function”: If you want to have CrewCal call an event that has one phrase OR another phrase you can do something similar but it would be using 2 “pipes” (it’s this symbol “|”). So for example, if an event description has the words “House Washing” OR “Roof Cleaning” and you want either of those phrases to tell CrewCal to read that as crew 2’s event, you’d simply set up the crew in CrewCal to read that in the advanced options the description must contain: house washing || roof cleaning.

In the meantime, this is a pretty slick way to get the automation started!

If you’d like to reference the standard CrewCal setup article, click here.