Scheduling · Capacity
Doors, capacity & slots per hour
These three settings get confused constantly, because all of them look like they control “how many trucks can I take”. Only two of them do.
Open DoorsThe short version
| Setting | Controls | Doesn't control |
|---|---|---|
| Doors / door capacity | How many trucks can be here at once | What times carriers see |
| Slots per hour | The start times carriers can pick from | How many trucks fit |
| Duration + buffers | How much of the day each truck consumes | Which door they're on |
Two ways to run capacity
Settings → Scheduling → Pre-assign dock doors picks which model your location uses.
| Pre-assign on (default) | Pre-assign off | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Every appointment is placed on a specific door at booking time. | SimpleDock enforces a total concurrent-truck limit and commits no door. |
| A slot is offered when | At least one door that takes the appointment type, and is open at that time, is free for the whole buffered window. | Fewer than your door-capacity number of trucks overlap the window. |
| Capacity comes from | The number of active doors. | The Door capacity number. |
| Use it when | Doors differ — reefer plugs, a ramp, height limits — or you want the board to show door assignments. | Any free door will do and you assign in person on arrival. |
Switching pre-assign off hides the Doors item from that location's sidebar and reveals a Door capacity setting in its place.
With pre-assign on, each door can also have its own rules. Click a door on the Doors page (or choose Edit from its menu) to set Appointment types to Only these, or give it Custom hours. A door only takes the types you check, and only during its custom hours (which never extend past the location's hours). If no door takes a type, carriers can't book it. These rules only apply when doors are pre-assigned; with pre-assign off, doors are pooled and the rules are ignored.
Slots per hour is presentation, not capacity
Slots per hour sets the grid of start times carriers choose from. At 2, they pick from :00 and :30. At 4, every 15 minutes. That's the whole effect — it never changes how many trucks you can take.
A finer grid means more offered start times and tighter packing between appointments. A coarser one keeps arrivals on tidy boundaries, which is easier for a yard team to work to. Neither adds or removes capacity, so if you're trying to take more trucks, this is the wrong dial — you want more doors, higher capacity, or shorter durations and buffers.
What actually decides how many trucks fit
Capacity times day length, divided by the footprint of each appointment. The footprint is duration plus both buffers, which is the part that gets overlooked.
Two doors, hours of 08:00–17:00, a 90-minute type with 30 minutes of buffer either side: each truck consumes 2.5 hours, so each door takes three or four in a day — six to eight trucks, not the twelve the raw duration suggests. Trimming the buffers to 15 minutes each takes the footprint to two hours and adds roughly two trucks a day.
Adding and retiring doors
Doors are per location, with a name and a sort order that controls how they appear across the schedule and the TV board. Name them the way your yard team says them out loud — “Door 4”, “Reefer 2” — since that name shows up in emails and on the board drivers read.
Deactivating a door removes it from availability so nothing new gets booked there. Appointments already on it keep their times. Before taking a door out of service for a stretch, check what's already scheduled on it and move those trucks — the door going inactive doesn't relocate them for you.
Tracking dwell time
Track dwell time adds a one-tap Mark arrived to each appointment. Marking the appointment completed stamps the departure, and SimpleDock reports the time between the two in analytics.
It's on by default for new locations. Appointments you never mark arrived simply record no dwell, so partial use is fine: whatever your team remembers to tap becomes real data about where the time actually goes. If your team doesn't record arrivals, turn it off under Settings → Scheduling.