Managing crews and team members
Create and manage crew configurations — assign members with hourly rates, set crew types, and define default equipment for streamlined dispatching.
Crews are the operational units of your company. A crew goes to a job site together, gets dispatched as a unit, and has its time tracked collectively. Setting up crews properly in Gradeworks means dispatching is fast, cost tracking is accurate, and foremen know exactly who and what they're working with.
Creating a crew
- Navigate to Settings > Crews
- Click Add Crew
- Enter a name — use something your team will recognize on the dispatch board (e.g., 'Dirt Crew A', 'Paving West')
- Select a crew type from the dropdown (Dirt, Asphalt, Concrete, Equipment, Utility, General)
- Save the crew — you can now add members and equipment
Adding crew members
Click a crew to open its detail view, then add members from your user list. Each member has an hourly rate that's used for labor cost calculations. A person can belong to only one crew at a time — if you reassign them, they're removed from the previous crew automatically.
The order of crew members matters for display: the first member listed is treated as the crew lead (typically the foreman). Drag members to reorder. The crew lead appears first on dispatch cards and receives foreman-level notifications.
Crew types
Crew types categorize what kind of work a crew does. This is used for filtering on the dispatch board (show only paving crews), for capacity planning (how many dirt crews are available this week), and for reporting. Choose the type that best matches the crew's primary function.
Default equipment
Assign default equipment to each crew in the crew detail view. These are the machines the crew typically takes to a job. Default equipment auto-populates on dispatch cards when a work block is assigned to that crew. Dispatchers can add or remove equipment on a per-assignment basis without changing the crew defaults.
Deactivating crews
When a crew is disbanded or restructured, deactivate it in the crew settings rather than deleting it. Deactivated crews don't appear on the dispatch board or in crew dropdowns, but their historical data — time entries, project assignments, cost records — is preserved for reporting.
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