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. A day that looks like six jobs is really six jobs plus two hours in the car.

What a run actually is

The screen is Tools, then Routes. The day shown is today on your company's clock. The left column holds everyone with a job that day, 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 names 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 has nowhere to drive, so no run can hold it. 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. Each person needs a start point: click the person, then Start point, then Company depot or Their own address.

Leave at sets when they get going. A rostered shift that day overrides both their own time and the company default, so the roster and the run agree on their own. Finish back here covers the drive home where it is on the clock, as it is for anybody returning a company vehicle 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. This one matters more than the rest, because it decides whether a day is full. Most businesses find 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. Leave jobs with these statuses off runs takes the statuses no run should carry, such as on hold or waiting on a part. The day then shows workable jobs only.

A depot address the map cannot find will not save, which is the right behaviour. An address nobody can reach is not a depot.

The number that changes decisions

Once the run is built, the day reports its driving time, its time on site, and its total. Three numbers, and nobody had the first one until now.

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 rather than a scheduling one. Only the drive time beside the job shows it.

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 a statement about the work's geography.

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. An empty run shows up as an absence, and absences are invisible.

The Add job button beside a person there opens a form that already holds the day and the person. That is the whole loop: see the gap, fill the gap, in one place.

Change it where you are looking at it

The Add job button 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 gets planned through small corrections. A planner that makes somebody leave the screen for each one is a planner people abandon 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. Rostered with no jobs then offers only them. A job naming nobody stays under Jobs not on any run whichever site the picker shows. It belongs to no site until somebody takes 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. Every job gets a site at the point of booking. Nothing else here works without it.
2. Time on site holds the real average, never the best case.
3. Every person needs a start point, and a depot where they share one.
4. The statuses that stay off runs get ticked, so the day shows only workable jobs.
5. Jobs not on any run and Rostered with no jobs both get read every morning, in that order.

The wider flow either side of this is in job tracking for a trade business. Jobs that come back on a schedule belong in recurring jobs rather than in a rebooking by hand.