WindowBossPro Blog — Routes & Scheduling

Adding a Second Van: Splitting Window Cleaning Routes Between Two Crews

The second van is the biggest step most window cleaning companies take. The first van is an owner with a ladder. The second van is a business with a schedule, a crew you are not standing next to, and twice as many routes to build every day. Done well, it roughly doubles what you can take on. Done badly, it doubles the chaos.

The Routine Gets Bigger

The previous article, The Window Cleaning Dispatcher's Morning Checklist, laid out the daily routine for building and watching routes. With two vans, that routine stops being optional.

This article covers how to split the work between two crews in WindowBossPro, where employees are assigned to vans, the Scheduled List and dispatch board filter by van, and each tech's phone shows only their own route.

Signs You're Ready

The schedule usually tells you before you decide. Common signs:

• The Waiting List keeps growing, with overdue pins that never quite clear.
• You are booking one-time jobs three or four weeks out in the busy season.
• Storefronts want early mornings and homes want full days, and one van cannot do both well.
• You turn down work, or worse, stop answering the phone.

The window counts under every due job give you a rough idea of how many van-days of work you are holding. If it is consistently more than one van can handle, the second van has a job waiting for it.

Split by Work Type or by Area

There are two common ways to split routes.

By work type. One van on residential jobs, one on a storefront route. This is the typical setup, and it plays to the strengths of each: early, fast, many-stop storefront mornings on one van; careful ladder and inside work on the other. See The Residential Van and the Storefront Van: Two Kinds of Window Cleaning Routes.

By area. Both vans do everything, but each covers part of the service area, like north and south of the highway. This cuts drive time and works well if you do not have enough storefront work to fill a van.

Many companies start by area and move to work type as the storefront book grows. Either way, the Waiting List map shows where the work is, so you can draw the line where it makes sense.

Setting It Up

In WindowBossPro, add the second van, add the new employees with their own personal PINs, and assign them to the van. Because you are never billed per user, adding techs does not change your plan price. Tag clients if it helps, such as Storefront or Residential, so you can see at a glance which van they belong on.

From then on, building the day means assigning each due job to a van and a day, then filtering the dispatch board by van to auto-route and order each one separately. Each tech logs in with the company login and their PIN and sees only their own stops.

Keep Customers With Their Crew

Customers like seeing the same faces. A quarterly homeowner who has had the same tech for two years notices when a stranger shows up. Where possible, keep recurring customers on the same van each cycle. Splitting by area does this almost automatically.

The access notes and window details on each address help when a change is unavoidable. The new tech sees the gate code, the dog, where to set the ladder and the skylight over the kitchen right on the card, so the first visit goes like the twentieth.

Watching Two Vans

With two crews out, the office map matters more. Crew GPS shows both vans, and the dispatch board shows what each has left. When a same-day request comes in, you can see which van is closer and has room. When one van finishes early, it can pick up a due job from the other's area.

Customer texts keep working the same way on both vans, so customers get on-the-way and arrived texts no matter who is coming.

Hiring for the Second Van

The software part of a second van is quick. The people part takes longer. A new tech needs to learn your standards for glass, ladders and customers, and that usually means riding along with you or your best tech for a few weeks before running a route alone. Start the new van on easier routes, like outside-only 1-story homes or a storefront morning, and move it to bigger residential days once the crew is ready. The window details on every job make it easy to give a newer crew the right kind of day.

Two Vans, One Schedule

A second van works when both crews run from the same Waiting List, the same dispatch board and the same customer records. Split the work in a way that fits your book, assign techs to vans, and build each van's day separately. For more on the routing tools, visit the WindowBossPro window cleaning route software page.