Double-Booking & Overtime Guard: Catch Schedule Conflicts Before the Board Goes Live

The problem this kills

You build the day's schedule, hit publish, and then the day falls apart. One tech is somehow booked for two jobs at the same time. Another has back-to-back appointments forty minutes apart in a city where that drive takes an hour. A third quietly rolls past their hours and you find out when the overtime hits payroll. Every one of these was sitting right there in the schedule before it went live — you just had no fast way to see them.

So the board goes out, the dispatcher spends the morning firefighting, customers get called to reschedule, techs sit in traffic missing windows, and the overtime bill is a surprise nobody approved. The schedule "looked fine" because checking it by eye — across a dozen techs and fifty stops — is genuinely impossible. You don't need a scheduling consultant or a six-figure platform to fix this. You need a quick validator that reads the proposed schedule and tells you exactly what's broken before you commit. And you can build it yourself.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool that acts as a pre-publish gate for your daily board. A dispatcher loads the proposed schedule — each assignment with its tech, start time, duration, and location — either by importing a sheet or pulling from your scheduling system. The tool then runs a conflict scan across three checks built from your rules:

• Double-bookings — the same tech assigned to two appointments whose times overlap.
• Impossible travel — two consecutive stops where the gap between them is shorter than the estimated travel time (from zone or distance) plus your configured buffer.
• Overtime — any tech whose total scheduled hours cross your overtime threshold for their region or union rule.

Every conflict shows up in a clear list with a plain-language explanation ("Maria: Job #4412 ends 2:00, Job #4419 starts 2:15, but the drive is ~35 min"). The dispatcher resolves each one — by moving, reassigning, or shortening a job — or explicitly accepts it with a reason. The board can only be marked Published once every conflict is cleared or accepted. Out the other side: a clean board and a CSV export of the validated schedule in the exact columns your system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you build the board today and who owns it, what scheduling system or sheet your assignments live in, the real field names and ID conventions in your data, how you estimate travel (zones, distance, or fixed assumptions) and what buffer you want between jobs, your exact overtime thresholds and how they differ by region or union, your typical and peak job volumes, and the messy edge cases (all-day jobs, on-call shifts, two-person jobs, lunch breaks) — and then it tailors the data model, the three conflict checks, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the schedule import, the overlap check, the travel-gap check, the overtime check, the conflict-resolution screen, the publish gate, and the validated CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and run the whole thing today even with no integration to your scheduling software.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This tool decides whether a schedule is safe to commit, so it ships with the controls a dispatch operation needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own company's schedules, a complete audit trail of who loaded, scanned, resolved, accepted, and published each board and when, a hard human-approval gate so a board with unresolved conflicts simply cannot be published — the AI flags, a dispatcher decides — and duplicate guards keyed on tech + time slot so the same assignment can't be loaded or counted twice. Every accepted conflict carries a recorded reason, so when a "we knew about that overtime" question comes up later, the answer is on file.

Who it's for

Dispatchers, schedulers, and operations managers at HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pest-control, landscaping, appliance-repair, and other field-service operations — anyone who builds a daily board across multiple techs and stops and wants to catch the conflicts before they become the day's emergencies. If you can describe how you decide a tech is overbooked, how long the drives take, and when overtime kicks in, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll have your first clean, validated board published the same afternoon.