Guides / Running the work
Scheduling painting crews
Painting schedules break for reasons other trades do not have: coatings need dry time, exteriors need weather, and a job can be ready for its second coat and still not be workable today. Good scheduling in this trade is mostly about having somewhere for a lost day to go.
Always have an interior job available
The single most valuable scheduling habit for a company doing exterior work is keeping an interior job in reserve. A rained-out exterior day with nowhere to send the crew is a day of wages for nothing; the same day with an interior job in progress is a normal day.
This means deliberately not finishing interior work as fast as possible during exterior season, which feels wrong and is correct.
Schedule the dry time, not just the work
Two coats is not two consecutive activities. Recoat windows, humidity, and cure before reassembly or reinstallation all consume calendar without consuming labor.
If your schedule tracks labor days only, every multi-coat job will appear to finish earlier than it can, and you will have promised a date you cannot hit. Put the waiting on the calendar.
Sequence around the other trades
On any job with other trades, you are either painting before them and getting damaged, or after them and waiting. Both are normal; what is not survivable is pricing for one and performing the other.
Touch-up after other trades finish is a separate visit and should be scheduled and priced as one.
The crew has to see it without asking you
If the schedule lives in your head, or in a group text, then every change costs you a round of phone calls and somebody still turns up at the wrong address. The schedule has to be somewhere the crew can look at it.
That is most of what the crew app is for: each person sees the jobs they are on and the dates coming up, which removes the single largest category of interruption from an owner's day.
Do not schedule to 100 percent
A schedule with no slack converts any single problem into a cascade — one job running a day long pushes the next three. In a trade where weather alone guarantees disruption, planning for full utilization guarantees broken promises.
Leave gaps. They get used.
Confirm the day before, every time
A short confirmation to the customer the day before prevents the most expensive scheduling failure there is: a crew arriving at a house nobody is home at, or a room nobody cleared.
It is also the cheapest customer-experience improvement available, and the customers who get it mention it.
Questions
How do you schedule around rain for exterior painting?
Keep an interior job in reserve so a rained-out day has somewhere to go. That means deliberately not finishing interiors as fast as possible during exterior season.
Should I schedule my crews at full capacity?
No. With no slack, one job running long pushes the next three — and in a weather-dependent trade disruption is guaranteed. Leave gaps; they get used.
How should the crew find out their schedule?
Somewhere they can look without asking you. A schedule that lives in your head or a group text means every change costs a round of phone calls and somebody still goes to the wrong address.
Where this stops being arithmetic
Aerys prices a job from your own catalog and production rates, sends it with an accept link and the invoice already attached, and then compares what the job actually cost against what you quoted — by task, while the job is still running.