Planning the day's runs so the drive time is not a guess

Every morning in a field business somebody does the same piece of arithmetic in their head. Six jobs, three vans, one of them on the other side of town, and the customer who has already rung twice. It gets solved in about ninety seconds, and it is wrong in a way nobody finds out about until three o'clock.

The error is almost never the jobs. It is the space between them. Drive time is invisible on a list, so it gets estimated at zero, and a day that looks like six jobs is really six jobs plus two hours in the car.

What a run actually is

Open Tools, then Routes. The day shown is today on your company's clock. Everyone with a job that day is listed on the left, with their stops in driving order and the drive time between them.

A job joins a person's run when three things are true: its date is that day, it links to a site, and it is assigned to them. Miss any one and it sits under Jobs not on any run, which is the list worth reading first. A job with no site cannot be routed because there is nowhere to drive to, and a job with nobody on it is not yet anybody's day.

That list is also the honest measure of how good your intake is. If half the jobs booked yesterday have no site on them, the problem is the booking form, not the routing.

The day starts somewhere

A run that starts at its first job is a run that hides the first drive of the day, which is often the longest. Set where each person starts: click the person, then Start point, and choose Company depot or Their own address.

Leave at sets when they get going, and a rostered shift that day sets it ahead of their own time and the company default, so the roster and the run agree without anybody keeping them in step. Tick Finish back here where the drive home is on the clock, as it is for anybody taking a company vehicle back to a yard.

A start address is visible only to admins and to that person. Somebody starting from their own front door should not have their address on a screen the whole team reads.

Set the defaults once

Under Settings, Time on site (minutes) is what a job takes when it has no time of its own. Get this roughly right before anything else: it is the number that decides whether a day is full, and most businesses discover their real average is longer than the one in their head.

Leave at is when runs start. A Depot address covers the staff who start from one place. Under Leave jobs with these statuses off runs, tick the statuses that should never be routed, such as a job on hold or waiting on a part, so the day shows work that can actually be done.

A depot address that cannot be found on the map is not saved, which is the right behaviour: an address nobody can drive to is not a depot.

The number that changes decisions

Once the run is built, the day says how long the driving is, how long the time on site is, and how long the whole day comes to. Three numbers, and the first one is the one nobody had before.

It changes two decisions immediately. Whether today can take the urgent job that just came in, which is now a question with an answer rather than a feeling. And whether a run is worth doing at all: two hours of driving for a forty minute job is a quote problem, not a scheduling problem, and you can only see it when the drive time is on the screen beside the job.

Over a few weeks the same numbers answer a bigger question, which is how tightly your work clusters. A round that averages three hours of driving a day is telling you something about where you take work from.

Who is rostered with nothing booked

Rostered with no jobs lists the people who are on today and have nothing on their run. It is the most valuable list on the screen and the one people forget to look at, because an empty run shows up as an absence, and absences are invisible.

Click Add job beside a person there and the day and the person are already filled in. That is the whole loop: see the gap, fill the gap, in one place.

Change it where you are looking at it

Add job creates a job with the day already set. The pencil beside any job, on a run or off it, changes it. The bin archives it, and anybody who is not an admin sends an admin a request instead.

None of that sends you to a Jobs table and back. A day is planned by making small corrections to it, and a planner that makes you leave to make each one is a planner people stop using by Wednesday.

On the phone, Add job is at the top of Routes and Edit is on a stop, so the same corrections work from the van.

More than one site

With several sites, the picker beside the date narrows the day to the people whose staff record says they work there, and Rostered with no jobs offers only them. A job nobody is assigned to stays under Jobs not on any run whichever site you pick, because it belongs to no site until somebody is on it.

Choosing another company in your group shows that company's day read only. To plan or change it, switch to that company. Running two venues without switching companies covers where that line falls and why.

Getting it running

1. Put a site on every job at the point of booking. Nothing else here works without it.
2. Set Time on site to your real average, not your best case.
3. Give every person a start point, and a depot if they share one.
4. Tick the statuses that should stay off runs, so the day shows only workable jobs.
5. Read Jobs not on any run and Rostered with no jobs every morning, in that order.

The wider flow either side of this is in job tracking for a trade business, and the jobs that come back on a schedule are worth setting up as recurring jobs rather than being rebooked by hand.