Mike Andes introduces Copilot CRM's new Waitlist feature for one-time jobs, which holds accepted estimates before scheduling to prevent triggering automations early. A new Unscheduled Work tab lets admins see all pending jobs in one place and manage capacity without opening each estimate individually.
Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes, founder at Copilot CRM. Very happy to announce one feature today that has probably been the most requested feature inside of Copilot since we began. And that's a wait list. So the waitlist is now in production. As of right now we have released it for one time jobs. We're going to be releasing it in the future for multi step programming as well as recurring jobs. Now what is a wait list? Why is it necessary? Well, we got a lot of feedback from our members that said, hey, a job got accepted on an estimate and I know I want to put it on the schedule, but I'm not exactly sure when. Based upon the weather, based upon my crew availability, based upon the fact that we're really far booked out, I don't know exactly where to put it on the schedule. And so some of the workarounds people were just, they were just scheduling it months into the future or sometime generally when they think they're going to do it. But the problem with that is it could fire off an automation to a customer. It could also throw off your budget hour capacity. It wasn't super clean. And so we have now created a wait list where when a job has been accepted from an estimate, you don't have to put it on the schedule, you can just put it on the wait list and you can have a date range of when you know the service needs to be done. So for example, if it's a service that needs to be done during a 60 to 90 day window, you can put that on the wait list and then it will give you alerts as to when it's about to be overdue, when it needs to get done. It's getting close to the end of that range now. Something that was really interesting as we began to talk to members and ask them really what is a wait list for? We started realizing there was actually a gap between accepted estimates and even the wait list. And we started to think about what is the process of someone scheduling a service. If I was to talk to my admin person and say, hey, I want you to go put all of the accepted estimates on the schedule right now as it currently stands. They would go to the estimates page, they see the list and with the new estimate statuses they would filter down by estimates that were accepted and not yet scheduled. Then they would drill into each estimate and they'd see the line items that were accepted and then in each line item they would then schedule from there. That's a lot of clicks and it requires going all the way into a line item and then coming all the way back out to the estimate list, then all the way back in, back and forth, while at the same time probably having another tab open to see your schedule, see your budget hours, see what your calendar is looking like. And so we've actually created something that I think is completely new to the industry, and that is something between the estimate being accepted and the wait list. And it's called a place called unscheduled work. Think of it like a place where you just look at your estimate list and you schedule and you filter down by estimates that have been accepted but need to be scheduled. But instead of having to drill into each estimate now and scheduling the line items and coming back, it's now all in one place. One page where I can tell my admin person, hey, it's Monday morning. Ten estimates were accepted. I want you to go to the unscheduled work tab, and directly from there you can schedule. You can see the budget hours, and you can find a place to put it on the schedule or just throw it back onto the wait list. This allows a really continuous workflow. And we see in the future, in the future of 2026, the ability from the unscheduled work tab to be able to surface things like budget hours, your crew capacity, and other factors that would allow you to be able to schedule directly from that page and automating that process to take admin time off of your plate and make sure that the schedule isn't getting overbooked and that you're actually getting things that were accepted on the schedule or the wait list. So we're really looking forward to seeing how you use this. This is the first step in the evolution of the wait list and on scheduled work. We have a lot of plans for this in 2026, but I'm looking forward to being able to really serve the members that have been looking for this waitlist, waiting for it to be able to take an accepted estimate, throw it in the wait list, and now have an unscheduled work tab where you just know everything that gets accepted goes there. No more relying on filtering. No more relying on alerts or an email or text reminding you that the estimate was accepted. You just go to one tab and from there you can schedule all your line items.
