Locksmith dispatcher account with no access to your money — JobBase Dispatching

01The trust paradox of hiring a dispatcher

Friday evening, you're on a lockout, and while you work the phone buzzes four times in your pocket. You call back at ten: two numbers don't pick up anymore, one already found somebody else, the fourth is a robocall. Two real jobs just went to the shop across town — not because you're worse, because you were busy doing the actual work.

That's the moment almost every owner lands on the same thought: time to put someone on dispatch. But doing that means handing them access to your working system, and along with the orders comes the money: what you charge, what you pay the tech, your margin, what leads cost you. Giving that to someone hired off a job ad a week ago is scary — tomorrow they can walk to the competitor next door with your economics in their head.

The people you'd actually trust with it — a spouse, a sibling, an old partner — usually can't take the role; they have their own job and their own hours. Whoever is free to sit on the phone for a paycheck is, as a rule, a stranger. That's the loop most owners get stuck in.

Without a proper tool, the workarounds all cost something. Give a stranger full access and hope they're honest, and it works for some, for years, but your books stay wide open the whole time. Set up a separate account for them and reconcile the two databases by hand, and the systems drift, numbers stop matching, and orders get lost or double-counted at the seam. Or don't hire at all and run dispatch yourself, which caps how much work you can take on and burns you out.

02What JobBase offers

We built Dispatching around exactly this paradox. A dispatcher account is a subaccount inside your workspace: a Dispatching item in the owner's sidebar leads to a Dispatcher Accounts page where you create and configure these people.

We're not theorizing here — we run our own crew of techs across the US and lived this problem before writing a line of code for it. The dispatcher works in the same product you do: same orders and leads, same schedule, quotes clients a price, assigns technicians. But wherever your interface shows whose share an order is, your margin, or your profit, theirs is blank. No second account to set up, no data hauled across at night — it's one database, shown differently by role.

As far as we know, we're the first to build this into a locksmith CRM, and we're not planning to patent it: the sooner it's normal in the trade, the better for every shop.

03Creating the account and setting visibility

You create the account on the Dispatcher Accounts page: email, name, password, and a visibility window in days. Note the password — you, the owner, set it, not the dispatcher. That matters later, when you fire them.

There's no row of "can create orders" or "can't delete" toggles. What a dispatcher does is fixed by the role; what you control is what they see, across three areas, each set to either "All" or a specific list:

• Sources — which lead sources they work.
• Partners — which partner profiles they can access.
• Technicians — which techs they see and can assign orders to.

On top of that sits the visibility window itself: 1 to 365 days. Set it to 30 and they work the last month, with everything older out of view, so a new hire deals with the current flow instead of paging through last year's archive.

Advertising isn't part of this list at all. Ad spend and return stay unreachable no matter how you set the three areas — that route is blocked at the access level, before any screen loads.

04What the dispatcher sees, and what they don't

Short answer: they see and quote prices; they don't see your economics.

While building an order, the dispatcher sees your catalog's client-facing prices, can add a custom line item or part at a price of their own when the job doesn't fit the catalog, and watches the running total add up as they go — otherwise they'd have nothing to quote the client over the phone. Once that order is saved, though, they can't reopen it to see money in it: not the total, not a payment mark, not even for an order they entered themselves an hour earlier. The order form also strips out who ultimately closes the order, a margin hint, the percentage picker, and the operator share for a given partner or technician. And by design, the dispatcher assigns an order to a technician but doesn't close it or collect the client's signature — that final step, where the money comes together, stays with you or the technician on site (a separate piece covers how the technician account closes a job).

In their own analytics, a dispatcher sees only their own collected gross on the jobs they entered and the rate they've earned on it, never your net profit, the company's share, margin, other people's shares, or ad spend and return. They also get a personal Finance section showing their own gross, their accrued rate, what's been paid, and the balance owed — a pay stub, not a window into your books.

05Paying a dispatcher: percentage or flat rate

Two pay types are built in: a percentage of collected gross, or a flat rate per period — weekly, biweekly, or monthly either way. The percentage is calculated on gross, not profit, on purpose: it lets you pay a dispatcher a cut without ever showing them your margin. Their rate is pegged to what they actually drove in through orders.

The program works out what's owed on its own, a percentage of gross or a flat amount times periods passed, and you mark payouts as you make them with an amount and an optional note. Everything adds into a history, so at any point you can see what's accrued, what's been paid, and what's left.

06Not all dispatchers are the same

The word covers two different people. One runs a lead start to finish: takes the call, quotes the price, talks a hesitant client into it, assigns the tech, confirms the job actually happened. A percentage of gross fits them; they move real money. The other just books appointments: answers, logs the address and time, puts it on the schedule. Not sales, but without them the phone rings into a void.

JobBase doesn't make you pick one type. Percentage of gross suits the first, flat rate the second, and you set the visibility either way. How this pairs with a technician in the field — who took the job, who closed it, who earned what share — is covered separately: how the dispatcher + technician team works in JobBase.

07Revoking access, oversight, and logs

Hired relationships end, and not always well, so we made firing as simple as hiring. The account has a Stop button: press it and the account disables instantly, with every session invalidated at once. If the dispatcher is logged in at that moment, their session dies immediately, not whenever a token happens to expire.

The password is the second lever: you can reset it from your own account, which also kills every token at once. The dispatcher, meanwhile, can't reset their own password, change their email, turn on two-factor, or use a forgot-password flow. Every one of those doors is yours alone, so the account can't be taken out from under you.

While they work, every order and lead they create is tagged with who created it, a label like "Dispatcher draft", so with several dispatchers on the books it's always clear whose order is whose. An audit log on top records the key events: account creation, access changes, password resets, new orders or leads, pay-term changes, and payouts, so if you ever need to reconstruct what happened and when, the history is there.

08FAQ