August 2024: a diary that fills itself from the round
August 2024 was the diary. Set a frequency once and every future visit appears on the schedule; move a visit by dragging it. Here is how the board came together.
Part 11 of 39 of Building TradeYoke, the story of how the platform was built, from January 2024 to today. Previous: July 2024: a library for the paperwork, filed where you will look. Next: September 2024: getting an existing round in without retyping it. See every part on the build timeline.
Quick answer
Quick answer: TradeYoke's schedule fills itself from your rounds: set a frequency on a job once and every future visit appears in day, week, month and list views, colour-coded by trade. You can move a visit by dragging it to another day, and skip a stop with a reason.
Key takeaways
- The diary projects future visits from each job's repeat rule, so nobody types them in.
- Day, week, month and list views, filtered by trade or person.
- Dragging a visit to another day is how rain days are handled.
- Skipping a stop asks for a reason, so a missed clean is never a mystery.
The diary should do the typing
In August 2024 we built the schedule. The aim was simple: you should never type in a repeating visit twice. The job already knows it repeats every four weeks. The diary's job is to show those visits on the right days, so the next month is already there before you look.
What the board does
- Four views. Day, week, month and a plain list, because different questions need different shapes. The day view is for doing, the month for seeing whether the round is full.
- Colour by trade. When a business later runs more than one trade, you can tell them apart at a glance.
- Filters. By trade and by person, so one person's week is one click away.
- Drag and drop. Pick a visit up and put it on another day, or reorder the day. This is how a rain day is handled: you move the day, not the whole round.
- Skip with a reason. A stop that was not done is recorded as skipped, with why, rather than disappearing.
The detail that took the time
Drag and drop sounds easy and is not. A diary that lets you drop a visit anywhere is a diary that lets you drop it somewhere wrong by accident. We spent a long time on the small things: what counts as a meaningful move, how to reorder within a day without moving it to another one, and how to keep it usable with a thumb as well as a mouse. Our guide to rain days and carried-over work shows how it works in practice.
Why it matters for the money
A visit that is on the diary is a visit that can be invoiced. Later in the build, the invoice grew out of the completed visit, so getting the diary right in August paid off in October, when invoicing began.
Next
Next month: getting an existing round into the app without retyping it.
Questions people ask
Does the TradeYoke diary fill itself?
Yes. Set a repeat rule on a job once and the diary shows every future visit in day, week, month and list views.
How do I handle a rain day?
Drag the affected visits to another day on the schedule. The round itself does not change, only that day's visits.
Try it on your own week
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