Assigning a team leader to a truck
What a truck's Team Leader field actually controls — push notifications and dashboard scoping.
Each truck can have a Team Leader. It is optional, and it does something narrower than the name suggests.
Setting a Team Leader does not put that person on any job. Assigning a truck to a job never adds crew — not automatically, not as a suggestion, not as a default. Crew is always added by hand on the job's Crew row.
If you have been setting this field expecting your leaders to appear on jobs, they never have.
What it actually does
Push notifications. The truck's Team Leader is who receives push notifications about that truck's jobs. This is the main reason to set it — it decides whose phone buzzes.
Dashboard scoping. The dashboard uses it to work out which trucks are "yours", so a leader signing in sees figures for their own vehicles.
Display. The Team Leader column on the trucks list shows who is assigned.
That is the whole feature.
Setting it
Go to Fleet > Trucks, click a truck to open its edit panel, and choose from the Team Leader dropdown. It defaults to No team leader. Click Update Truck.
The dropdown lists people from your team, showing names only — no roles, despite what you might expect. View-only Users are excluded, so if someone is missing from the list, check their user role first.
How crew actually gets onto a job
This is the part people are usually looking for when they find this setting.
Open the job and use the Crew row → Add crew. Once someone is on the job, click their badge to set:
- Role on job — Leader, Driver, or Offsider.
- On truck — which of the job's trucks they are riding, when the job has several.
All of it is manual, and all of it is per job. There is no default crew anywhere in VanMan.
Tutorial: make sure the right person gets notified
Your most experienced leader runs Atlas. You want their phone to be the one that buzzes.
Go to Fleet > Trucks and click Atlas. Set Team Leader to them. Click Update Truck.
Be clear about what you just bought: their phone now gets Atlas's job notifications, and Atlas counts as one of their trucks on the dashboard. Nothing else changed.
Open a job with Atlas assigned. Look at the Crew row — it is empty. Setting the Team Leader did not touch it and never will.
Click Add crew and select them. Now they are actually on the job.
If this is a two-truck job, click their crew badge and use On truck to put them on Atlas specifically. Their badge picks up Atlas's colour.
Without this, you know who is on the job but not who is in which vehicle.
In the same menu, set Role on job to Leader.
Note this is separate from the truck's Team Leader field — one is about notifications, the other is about this job's crew. They can legitimately be different people on any given day.
Do not swap the truck's Team Leader field expecting jobs to reassign. Nothing reassigns.
Change it only so notifications go to whoever is covering — that is the actual effect. The crew on each job still has to be changed job by job.
A person needs a staff role (Settings > Staff Roles) before they can be added as crew at all. That is a different list from user roles — a person can be schedulable crew without ever having a login.