Routes and route optimization

Driving is the cost that doesn't show on an invoice. Route optimization reorders a day's jobs so the drive between them is as short as possible, which is worth real money once you're running more than three or four stops.

It lives on the Schedule, because a route is just a day of jobs in a sensible order.

Where the controls are

Once you have jobs on the calendar, two buttons appear in the Schedule toolbar:

Route Optimization takes the jobs already booked for a day and reorders them by drive time. It doesn't move jobs to other days or change appointment windows you've promised, it sequences what's there.

Employee Scheduling sets who's working and when, which is what route optimization assigns against.

On a brand new account with no jobs booked, neither button is on the page yet. That's expected. Book a job and they appear.

Planning visually first

Before you build a day, the map is the better planning tool. Show Customers puts your existing customers on the map so you can see clusters.

The practical version of this: pick the neighbourhood with four customers due, book those four, and let route optimization sequence them. Optimizing a day that already spans three towns just finds the least-bad order of a bad plan.

How to use it in practice

1. Book jobs in clusters, using the map to see where your customers already are.
2. Set who's working that day under Employee Scheduling.
3. Run Route Optimization on the day.
4. Check the result before dispatching. It optimises for drive time, and it doesn't know that one customer is always late leaving for work.

Tips and gotchas

• Optimize after booking, not instead of it. Good clustering beats good sequencing.
• Fixed appointment windows constrain it. If you promised four separate two-hour windows, there isn't much left to optimise.
• Re-run after changes. Adding or cancelling a job invalidates the order.
• The buttons only exist once jobs do. An empty Schedule doesn't show them.

Next up: Canvassing reports