# Sort the day out when a job overruns

Source: https://help.mucka.ai/schedule/sort-the-day-out-when-a-job-overruns
Category: Schedule
Last updated: 2026-09-01

> Tell Mucka a job has run long and it re-plans what's left of the day, works out the drive times, and drafts a text to every customer it actually affects.

Every job overruns sometimes. The valve is seized, the boiler is a different model to the one on the ticket, or the customer wants a word. What used to happen next was the worst part: pull over, open the app, tap through every job left, retype the times, then message each customer one at a time.

Now you tell Mucka once.

## Ask for it

On your phone, hold the Mucka button and say it however it comes out:

> "The last one's overrun by half an hour — sort the rest of the day."

> "I'm running about two hours behind."

Mucka looks at what's left in your diary, works out how it fits back together, and comes back with a plan. **Nothing has moved at that point and nobody has been texted** — it goes to the office as one card to approve.

From the office, you can start the same thing from the overrun card in your Actions list. Tap **Sort the rest of the day**, and if you want somebody else's day sorted rather than your own, just name them: *"Kev's running an hour behind, sort his day."*

## What Mucka actually does with it

It doesn't just shove everything back by the same amount. It takes each remaining job on its own:

- **Leaves it alone.** If the customer was promised between two and four and they're still getting you between two and four, nothing has changed for them and they don't need a text.
- **Moves it later.** The ordinary case, with the drive time from the previous job built in.
- **Hands it to somebody else.** If a colleague is free and can actually get there, Mucka will offer that instead of pushing an urgent job to next week.
- **Puts it out to another day.** A quote visit can usually wait. A breakdown can't.
- **Takes it off the diary.** For the ones where you'd rather ring the customer yourself.

Drive times between the addresses are measured properly, so Mucka won't propose a job you physically cannot reach in the gap. It also won't run anybody past your closing time, and it won't move a job outside an arrival window the customer was already given.

## What you get, and what you have to do

One card, with:

- the new time for every job that's changing, and the ones that aren't, so you can see the whole day rather than just the damage
- **the exact words of every text**, and who each one is going to
- anyone with no mobile on file, **named**, so you know to pick the phone up

Then you tap it. Only then do the jobs move and the texts go out.

The engineer who asked for the plan can't approve it — that's deliberate. Approving needs permission to edit jobs on top of the usual permission to approve actions, so it's an owner or a manager.

## When Mucka offers without being asked

If Mucka has already messaged an engineer on WhatsApp asking how they're getting on, and they reply with an actual figure — *"another two hours"* — Mucka puts the plan together on its own and drops the card in your Actions.

It only does that off a real number. "Nearly done" and "not long" are perfectly good things for a man under a floor to say, but they're not something a day can be re-planned from, so Mucka leaves those alone.

## Things worth knowing

- **Customers are told by text.** If there's no mobile on file, the card says so rather than quietly skipping them.
- **Small slips don't get a text.** Under about a quarter of an hour, nobody would notice and a text just teaches people to ignore your texts.
- **Nobody mid-project gets one either.** If you're on day four of their bathroom, they know — the van's been outside all week.
- **Ask again if things change.** A second plan replaces the first rather than stacking up beside it, so you're never looking at two versions of the same afternoon.
- **If something has moved since the plan was made** — the job finished, the office shifted it by hand, the customer cancelled — Mucka skips that one when you approve and tells you which and why. It won't force a plan onto a day that's changed underneath it.