Customers, jobs & scheduling

Add customers manually, or let them arrive automatically from your booking site and intake forms. Each customer keeps a full history — jobs, quotes, invoices, payments, and messages — in one timeline.

From a customer's page, the Jobs, Quotes, and Invoices tabs each have their own "New …" button — it opens the create form with that customer already selected, so you never have to leave the page and pick them again from a dropdown.

Already have a customer list elsewhere? From Customers, click Import and upload a CSV — including a direct export from Jobber or Housecall Pro. Meridian reads the file's column headers and guesses which column is which (name, company, email, phone, address); review and adjust the mapping, preview a few rows, then import.

If your export splits the address into separate Street / City / State / Zip columns (common in Jobber and Housecall Pro), map those instead of a single Address column — they land on the right fields so the customer still shows up correctly in search and the customer list's Location column.

Customers already in your workspace are skipped automatically — matched by email or phone, including duplicates within the file itself — so re-importing the same list twice never creates doubles. Rows with nothing identifying (no name, company, email, or phone) are skipped too. Imports are limited to 5,000 rows at a time; a summary after each import shows how many customers were added and how many were skipped.

Create a job to schedule work: pick the customer, set the date/time, and add details. Jobs move through clear statuses (draft → scheduled → in progress → complete), and the changes are validated so a job can’t skip a step.

Jobs created from a booking or an accepted quote carry their details across automatically — no re-typing.

Need to quote follow-up work on a job you're already looking at? Its Quotes card has a "New quote" button that carries the customer and the job along, so the new quote lands linked to both.

The Schedule view shows upcoming work so you can see the day at a glance and assign crew. Crew see their assigned jobs on the mobile app.

Every evening, each crew member with a shift the next day automatically gets one text with their schedule — times, job, address, and who else is on the shift with them (never a customer's phone number). Crew with no phone on file simply don't get one; they still see the same schedule in the mobile app.

Don't want to wait for the evening text — a schedule just changed, or a crew member asked for it now? On the dispatch board's day view (Dashboard → Schedule → Board), "Text crew their day" sends that same text immediately for whatever date you're viewing, to everyone with a shift that day; it confirms how many crew will be texted first. Each crew row also has its own small text icon to send just that one person's schedule. A manual send never blocks or replaces the evening one — both still go out.

From Schedule, click "Subscribe to your calendar" to get a personal link you add once to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook — your scheduled jobs then keep appearing there automatically, no separate app to check.

The link shows exactly what you see in Meridian: crew see only the jobs they're assigned to, office roles see the full team schedule. It's personal and secret, like a password — regenerate it any time to invalidate the old link, or revoke it entirely.

Beyond a job’s own status, you can log individual shifts against it — a block of scheduled time with a type (Labor, Drive, Install, Service, Maintenance, Inspection, or a custom type you define), a start and end time, and, optionally, the crew working it. Add one from the Shifts card on a job’s detail page.

To remove a shift, open it (the pencil icon on the Shifts card) and use “Delete shift” — it confirms first, then removes the shift and its crew assignments. One guardrail: if the shift has already credited a crew member’s earnings, it can’t be deleted — that would strand money someone is owed. Adjust the crew member’s balance from Payroll instead.

The list of shift types offered there is editable under Settings → Shift types — add, rename, reorder, or remove entries. Changing the list doesn’t affect shifts you’ve already scheduled.

When you create or edit a shift, set “Open slots for crew self-claim” to let crew pick up the work themselves: the shift appears on the Open Shifts board in the crew mobile app (Schedule tab) until enough crew have claimed it. Leave it at 0 to keep the shift assign-only — nothing changes about how you dispatch today.

Claiming is first come, first served and race-safe — two crew members can’t take the last slot at the same time. Before someone claims a shift they see only the date, time, shift type, pay rate, and city-level locations; the full addresses and customer details unlock once the shift is theirs.

The job page shows the live count (“2/3 crew”) so dispatchers always know what’s still uncovered.

Owners, Admins, and Accounting see a Profitability card on every job’s detail page: what’s been collected and what’s been invoiced, each measured against materials (expenses) and labor to show a margin — collected and invoiced are always shown separately, since cash in hand and cash billed answer different questions.

Labor cost comes from each assigned crew member’s hourly pay rate times their hours on the job (GPS-tracked time first, then clocked time, then the scheduled window as a last resort). If a crew member has no pay rate set, their hours still count but their cost doesn’t — the card marks labor and margin as a bound rather than showing a number that isn’t real.

Add a material or other cost straight from the card with “Add expense” — it feeds the job’s materials total immediately. This is separate from the pre-work estimate, which stays labeled “Estimated value” and never affects the margin math.