Getting Started with FlaggerLink: A Quick Tour

Your First Day on FlaggerLink

You've signed up. You're staring at a fresh dashboard. Now what?

Getting started with new software can feel overwhelming, especially when your current system — even if it's a whiteboard and a phone — is at least familiar. This post walks you through what the first few days on FlaggerLink actually look like, screen by screen.

No technical background required. If you can schedule a crew on a spreadsheet, you can do this.

The Dashboard: Your Home Base

The first thing you'll see after logging in is the Dashboard. It shows today's date and two operation summaries — one for today, one for tomorrow — each with a staffing ring that tells you at a glance how well-staffed your jobs are. Green means you're in good shape. Yellow or red means you've got gaps to fill.

Below the staffing rings, you'll see key numbers: how many employees are needed, how many are confirmed, and how many are still pending. If you're using SMS dispatch, you'll also see a flag showing how many texts are still waiting to go out.

The dashboard also has customizable widgets — weather forecasts, equipment utilization, certification metrics, and jobs by region — that you can drag around to fit how you like to work.

Setting Up: Customers and Employees

Before you schedule anything, you'll need two things in the system: your customers and your employees.

Adding Customers and Locations

Click Customers in the sidebar under the Resources group. Hit Add Customer and fill in their company name, address, and contact information. If a customer has multiple divisions or locations (like a GC with both a Portland office and a Salem office), you can add those as divisions under the customer.

While you're setting up customers, take a few minutes to add the locations — the yards, staging areas, and job sites where your flaggers are regularly dispatched to. Adding these to each customer and division now means they'll be available as quick selections when creating orders later, saving your dispatchers time every morning instead of typing the same addresses over and over.

Adding Employees

Click Employees in the sidebar (labeled "Flaggers" in the navigation). Hit Add Employee and fill in the basics: first name, last name, and phone number. You'll also set their experience level and status.

This is where you'll enter certifications too — state certifications, ATSSA credentials, or any other credentials relevant to your operation. Record the type and expiration date so you can reference it later when staffing jobs.

If you're using SMS dispatch, you'll see a Send Consent Text button on each employee's profile. This sends a compliance text asking the employee to opt in to receiving dispatch messages. The consent status shows up as a colored dot next to their phone number — green means they've consented, orange means pending, red means declined.

For a company with 30 employees, expect to spend about an hour getting everyone entered. Once it's done, your workforce is ready to schedule.

Setting Up Vehicles and Equipment (Growth and Advanced Plans)

If you're on a Growth or Advanced plan, you'll also want to set up your vehicles and equipment before you start scheduling.

Click Vehicles in the sidebar to add your fleet — truck numbers, make, model, and any details your dispatchers need when assigning vehicles to jobs. You can also set up loadouts, which are pre-configured equipment packages tied to a vehicle. If Truck 12 always goes out with an arrow board and a sign package, set that up as a loadout once and it's ready every time.

Click Equipment in the sidebar to build out your inventory. Equipment is organized by categories — arrow boards, sign packages, crash trucks, attenuators, cones, whatever your operation uses. Add each item with its description and status so your dispatchers can see what's available when planning jobs.

Getting vehicles and equipment into the system early means your dispatchers can check equipment and vehicle availability alongside crew availability — so you're not discovering at 5:30 AM that the arrow board you need is already committed to another site.

Creating Your First Order and Jobs

FlaggerLink organizes work as Orders containing Jobs. An order is the contract or project — "Main Street Widening for ODOT." Jobs are the individual work days under that order.

Here's how it works:

1. Click Orders in the sidebar under Operations
2. Click Add Order
3. Search and select the Customer and Division
4. Enter a Crew name (like "Crew A" or "Night Shift"), a start date, and any notes
5. Fill in any custom fields — billing info, location details, or scheduling notes
6. Click Create Order

You're now on the Order Management screen. Click Create Jobs in the summary bar to generate the individual work days. Select your dates, confirm staffing requirements, and the jobs are created.

The Schedule: Where Dispatchers Live

Click Schedule in the sidebar and you'll land on the scheduling board — the screen your dispatchers will have open all day.

The schedule view shows your jobs across a timeline. You can toggle between 1 Day, 1 Week, and 2 Week views. Each job card shows the job number, customer, crew, time, and staffing status — color-coded so you can spot gaps instantly. Green means fully staffed and confirmed. Orange means assignments are pending. Red means you still need people.

Click on any job card and a side panel opens with the full details: customer info, date, time, crew, and the list of assigned employees with their confirmation status. From this panel you can:

• Add employees by searching by name
• Toggle confirmation status for each assigned worker
• Open the full order for more detail

For dispatchers coming from spreadsheets or whiteboards, the scheduling board will feel familiar but faster. The information is the same — jobs, people, dates — but gaps and conflicts are visible immediately instead of discovered at 5 AM.

Sending Your First Dispatch

If you're using FlaggerLink's SMS dispatch add-on, click Dispatch in the sidebar (under Operations). This opens the dispatch screen — a day view showing every employee and their assignments.

Here's the workflow:

1. Click on an employee row for a specific date
2. A side panel opens showing their name, phone, consent status, and assigned jobs for the day
3. Click the Send Text button
4. FlaggerLink sends an SMS to the employee with their job details — location, time, and instructions — asking them to reply YES or NO
5. The status changes to Pending Response
6. When the employee replies, you'll see it in the Text History section at the bottom of the panel
7. Status updates: Confirmed (green), Declined (red), or Unclear (orange) if they sent something other than YES or NO

You can resend if needed, or cancel a pending dispatch. The dispatch status indicator at the top of the screen shows whether you're actively dispatching for a date and how many texts are still pending.

For dispatchers who've been making fifteen phone calls every morning, the first time they watch confirmations roll in via text is usually the moment they realize they're never going back.

Time Off and Call Outs

Click Time in the sidebar to manage time off and call outs.

The Time Off tab shows all requests in a filterable table — upcoming or past, pending or approved. You can add time off for an employee (date range, all day or specific hours, paid or unpaid, reason), and managers approve requests with a single click on the checkmark button.

The Call Outs tab is for when someone calls out of a scheduled shift. Hit Log Call Out and a two-step modal walks you through it:

1. Select the employee, the job they're calling out of, the reason (Sick, No Show, Personal, Late, or Other), and any notes
2. Optionally assign a replacement employee right there

Call outs are color-coded by reason so you can spot patterns at a glance.

The Map

Click Map in the sidebar for a geographic view of your operations. The map shows job locations as pins, with a date picker so you can see today's jobs, tomorrow's, or any date. You can search addresses and toggle between street and satellite views.

It's a quick way to see the geographic spread of your work and help dispatchers think about who's closest to which job site.

Tips for Getting Value Fast

Based on what we've seen from companies getting started:

Start with scheduling. Get your orders, jobs, and crew into the system first. Even without SMS dispatch, having a centralized scheduling board that shows all your jobs and assignments across branches is a major upgrade from spreadsheets.

Add SMS dispatch when you're ready. Once your team is comfortable with the scheduling workflow, adding the SMS add-on is the natural next step. It builds on the schedule you've already created — you're just adding the notification layer.

Enter certifications early. It takes a few extra minutes per employee during setup, but having certification data in the system from day one means you'll never scramble to figure out who's qualified for a DOT job.

Get your dispatchers involved. The people who'll use the system daily should be part of the setup process. They know which employees work which areas, which GCs are picky about crew qualifications, and which jobs tend to change at the last minute. That knowledge makes the system more useful from the start.

What Comes Next

Once you're up and running, FlaggerLink grows with your operation. The dashboard widgets give you daily visibility. Reports help you understand your business data. Multi-branch support keeps distributed teams coordinated. And as your operation scales, the platform scales with you.

The goal is simple: get your operation organized, your dispatchers efficient, and your managers informed. Everything else follows from there.

Ready to get started? See our pricing, explore the platform, or request a demo. Setup takes days, not months — and your dispatchers will thank you.