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Planado can send three types of SMS notifications:

• reminders about a job scheduled for a current day;

• message about a worker beginning his way to the client;

• notification about an assignee finishing the job.

SMS will be sent to the primary phone number of the job. If you picked one of the preexisting clients from the search, their phone number will be automatically copied to the primary phone field. In other cases, you can input it manually.

Job primary contact number 

You can configure SMS notifications on the Settings → General page.  

SMS notifications are not available in all subscription plans. If your plan does not have the SMS notifications function, the SMS settings will not be shown.

SMS notifications settings 

The Scheduled job message is used to send notifications for the jobs scheduled for the current day. These SMS notifications will be sent during the next hour from the one you set in the field Send out scheduled job messages at this hour. For example, if you set an hour of sending out to 9, SMS notifications will be sent from 9:00 am to 10:00 am.

In the field En route message you can enter a template for SMS notifications that will be sent to clients once your workers begin their way to clients' addresses. It will be sent when the worker presses the En route button in the mobile application (in other words, when a job changes its status to En route).

If the job scheduled for the current day is created after the send out an hour, the client will not receive a scheduled job notification.

The Finished job message will be sent when your assignee finishes the client's job. It can contain a thank you letter or a link to a feedback form that your client might want to fill out.

Message templates

The template of SMS notifications consists of text and substitutions. Substitutions are special words that use values of the corresponding fields of a job.

For example, you can set a scheduled job template like this:

Scheduled job template

A client will receive the following message at the beginning of the scheduled job day:

Scheduled job message

For the en route notification you can set a template:

En route message template

The client will receive a message when a worker en routes the job:

En route job message

Note, that one SMS can have only up to 70 symbols. If a message is longer, it will be split into two messages. Under the input field, you can see how many symbols you have entered, but it doesn't count words that will appear after substitution. Long substitutions (for example, the name of the company or worker's name) can make messages longer and a message will be split in two.

If a value for substitution is not present for a job (for example, if you used worker's phone substitution but the worker does not have a phone number), then the substitution will be ignored in the message.

Adding substitutions

To add a substitution, click the +Add substitution button near the template on the General settings page. After that, a list of possible substitutions will appear. Select an entity that you want to reference and then select its property. For example, a worker entity has two properties available for substitution: a worker's phone and a worker's name.

Adding substitutions

Substitutions can reference different entity properties and need to be full. For example, if you leave just a "job" substitution, you will not be able to save it. You need to specify it and make it, for example, a "job.number" substitution.

Here is a list of all the possible substitutions:

The name of the company can be set in the Settings → General menu under the Organization name field.

SMS notifications have Planado as a sender. Because of that, we recommend to include your company name in the message. This way your client will know the subject of the message. It can be done using this substitution or if you want to shorten the text of SMS, you can include the company's name as an ordinary text. For example, a company name substitution will return the full value of the field Postal Service Company consisting of 22 symbols. You can write in the template of a message as ordinary text name Postal Service, therefore, making the company's name consist only of 14 symbols, and the client will still understand the subject of a message.

This substitution will return the job's scheduled date and time. You can also use "job.scheduled at | date" or "job.scheduled at | time". They will return just the job scheduled date or just the job scheduled time.

Job scheduled at date and time 

This substitution is recommended to use in the scheduled job messages. A worker can start his way to the client earlier or later than the scheduled time, so a message including the scheduled time can confuse the client if it is sent as an en-route message. In the message template, you can add commentary about the time your worker will arrive at the client, for example: "in about 30  minutes".

This substitution will put job assignee first and last name to the message.

Assignee's name 

If instead of a single worker, the team was assigned, this substitution returns the first and last name of the team foreman.

Phone number of a worker assigned to a job.

Worker's phone number

If instead of a single worker, the team was assigned, this substitution returns the phone number of the team foreman.

Job serial number. 

Job number

This substitution will take the job serial number and post it to the SMS notification. You can specify a job number for a client if they need to reference it to your assignee or a dispatcher.

How to turn off SMS notifications

If you don't want to send clients SMS messages, just leave the message fields empty in the general settings.

In the article Troubleshooting with SMS notifications, you can find possible reasons why clients might not receive SMS notifications.

If you need any help, leave us a ticket or write to our email address: support@planado.app.