Make your ServiceM8 schedule easier to read at a glance with job category colours
If you’re managing a team and looking at the staff schedule view every day, anything that helps you take in what’s on the board more quickly is worth setting up. Job categories with colour coding is one of those things.
You can create job categories in ServiceM8 and assign each one a colour. That colour then shows as a small vertical bar on the right-hand end of each job block in the staff schedule view.
It’s subtle, but once you’ve got it set up it means you can scan the day and immediately see the shape of what’s booked in, without having to read every job card.
There are six colours available, so it works best when you keep your categories focused on the distinctions that actually matter to how you run your day.
A few examples of how different businesses might use it:
- A plumbing and heating company might use categories for Boiler Service, Boiler Repair, Heating, Plumbing, and Landlord/Gas Safety – so at a glance you can see how the day is weighted between planned maintenance and reactive work
- An electrical contractor might split by Domestic, Commercial, and Emergency Callout – useful for spotting quickly if an emergency job has been dropped into an already busy day
- A renewable energy business might use categories like Solar, Heat Pump, EV Charger, and Service Visit – helpful when engineers have different specialisms and you want to make sure the right work is going to the right person
- A fire and security company might categorise by Installation, Routine Inspection, and Reactive – so the office can see at a glance whether the day is running to plan or has shifted towards unplanned work
To set it up, go to ServiceM8.com > Account > Settings > Job Categories, create your categories, and assign a colour to each one. You can then set the category on each job card, or build it into your job templates so it’s applied automatically.
It takes about ten minutes to set up and makes the schedule view slightly easier to read, especially when you’ve got multiple engineers on the go.
Do you already use job categories, or is this something you’ve not got round to yet?
