Route optimization · Every plan
Route optimization software is software that puts a crew’s stops for the day into a driving order that wastes less time between properties. Ours is the Route Management page inside the same system that holds your customers, jobs and crews: load a route crew’s day, click Suggest Best Route, compare the suggested order with yours by drive time and miles, apply it, and memorize it for next week. On every plan.
The problem
A crew in the truck between lawns costs the same per hour as the same crew mowing. The customer pays for the cut, not the drive, so windshield time comes straight out of the margin. Our lawn mowing pricing guide works a made-up example of one crew on one paid day costing $104.73 per billable hour on a dense route and $144.00 on a scattered one. Same crew, same wages, same mowers. Our guide to lawn care route planning shows how to build the dense version: zones, service days, and what each extra minute between stops costs.
The usual route lives in the driver’s head. It made sense in April; then you added six lawns in a new subdivision, lost two on the old loop, and the new stops just went on the end. It works until the driver is out sick and a new hire is handed a list of addresses in whatever order they were typed. Route optimization puts the order in the software, where it can be suggested, checked, saved and handed to whoever drives.
How it works
Route Management is the planner for route-style crews: the ones that work down a list of stops on a date, with no clock times. Load a crew’s day and you get the stops in their current order with a map above them. Everything from there is a preview until you click Save Route.
Go to Schedule, Route Management, pick the Date and the Crew in the Filter card and click Load Route. The stops appear as cards with the job, customer, address and a Stop # badge, or Not ordered if the visit has never had a position. The Depot Start / Finish line shows the crew’s depot, or says it is missing with a link to fix it on the crew’s page.
In the Route setup card, Start is the crew depot, your current location or a custom address; Finish is return to start, the crew depot, your current location or a custom address. The S and F pins move on the map as you change them.
Fastest or Shortest, a departure time (8:00 AM by default) with planned traffic, and the roads to avoid: highways, toll roads, ferries, unpaved roads. Tick Remember these settings for this crew and they load with that crew’s day from then on.
A preview shows the Current order and the Suggested order with drive time and miles for each, and the Savings. If nothing would improve on your order, the preview says so. The map draws the suggested road line next to the current one.
Click Apply suggestion and each card shows its drive time and miles from the previous stop; stops that changed position are tagged moved. Undo puts your order back. Drag any stop by its handle or use the up and down arrows, and the Stop # badges renumber.
Click Save Route in the save bar. Nothing is saved until you do. The whole day saves at once; if any stop cannot be saved, nothing is, and the message says why. If someone changed the crew’s day after you loaded it, you get a Reload route button instead.
What the suggestion considers
A suggested order is useful when it was computed for the way your crew actually drives. The Route setup card holds those choices: where the day starts and finishes, fastest or shortest, when the truck leaves, and which roads it stays off.
The map shows what it decided. Numbered green pins are the stops, S the start and F the finish. Solid lines follow the roads, dark for the Current order and green for the Suggested one. After you apply, each stop card carries its drive time and miles from the stop before, so the savings are not one number taken on faith.
Fastest or Shortest. The quickest loop is not always the fewest miles; you pick which one the day is about.
Defaults to 8:00 AM, with Use planned traffic, so a 6:00 AM plow crew and a 9:00 AM mowing crew get different answers.
Highways, toll roads, ferries, unpaved roads. If no route fits your avoidances, a Try without avoidances button appears.
The crew depot, your current location, a custom address, or finish where you started. The depot comes from the crew’s page.
Up to 148 stops in a day. A stop whose address cannot be located is flagged on its card; fix it on the job site and try again.
Tick Remember these settings for this crew and the preferences load with that crew’s day from then on.
Memorized routes
A mowing loop does not change much week to week, so the puzzle should not be solved week to week either. Get the day into the order you want, suggested, then adjusted for gates, dogs and school pickups. Open More actions, click Memorize Route, name it, and it appears in that crew’s Memorized Route dropdown.
Next week, load Tuesday, pick Tuesday North Route, click Apply Template, and the stops rearrange to match. A stop that was not in the template, such as a customer who signed up on Thursday, drops to the end for you to place. Click Save Route. That is the whole weekly routine: load, apply, save.
Templates belong to the crew, so each crew keeps its own library of proven loops, and the same route works for whoever drives it this week.
A stop on a repeating visit changes position on the date you saved. Other dates in the series keep their own order, so a one-off change on this Tuesday does not rewrite every Tuesday.
The rest of Route Management
The stop order is the main job of the page, but the same More actions menu holds the three questions that follow it, and the saved order goes where the crew will see it.
After loading a route, Check Capacity shows the day’s total estimated hours against the crew’s capacity and warns if the route is over. It assumes an 8-hour crew day: the sanity check before you add one more stop, not a payroll figure.
When weather wipes out a day, shift the crew’s work instead of dragging visits one at a time. Enter the days to shift, click Preview to see exactly how many visits will move and across which dates, then Shift Visits. It moves every open visit for that crew on every date, so read the preview. Completed and skipped visits stay put; repeating series never move.
The saved order is what crews see. Stop numbers flow through to the crew app’s route and to the Route # column on the Visits page, and statuses come back the other way: On My Way, In Progress, Completed, or Skipped with the crew’s reason.
Every saved route and batch shift is written to Schedule History, the audit log of the schedule: when, what happened, which user, which visit. A Route order changed row is the answer to why stop 4 became stop 9.
The calendar, recurring visits, the dispatch board and the Today list the crew runs from are covered on the scheduling and dispatch page. This page is about the order of the stops.
By trade
Route optimization is for the crews that run a loop. The same page earns its keep differently depending on what the loop is.
A mowing crew is the route crew the page was made for: fourteen lawns on a Tuesday, a date and no clock times. Suggest the loop once, move the stops you know better than the map, memorize it as Tuesday North Route, and the weekly routine becomes load, apply, save. A new customer goes to the end of the applied template, where you place them.
A spray crew runs a route too, with the extra question of whether it can work at all. The Weather page rates spraying and fertilizing for the next 12 hours, flagging rain that can wash product off and wind over the 10 mph spray limit, and lists today’s and tomorrow’s visits at risk. When a whole day is lost, Rain / Delay Shift moves the crew’s open visits in one preview-first action.
Set each plow crew up as a route-style crew with a full depot address, and memorize its loop after the first storm. Next storm, load the day, apply the template, save. The storm event creates the visits; Route Management orders them. Set the departure time to when the trucks actually leave.
An install crew booked 9:00 to 11:30 at one property and 1:00 to 4:00 at another is a time-based crew, and time-based crews do not appear on Route Management. They live on the drag-and-drop calendar, covered on the scheduling and dispatch page. Most companies run both kinds of crew at once.
Compared
Three ways to decide which lawn is stop one.
| Question | Route by memory | Generic map app | LandscapingSoftware Route Management |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the stops come from | The driver’s head, or a printed list. | Addresses you type in each day; varies. | The visits already scheduled to that crew on that date. Nothing retyped. |
| Who decides the order | Whoever is driving. | Often a suggested order for a handful of stops; varies by app. | A suggestion for up to 148 stops, shown against your current order with drive time, miles and savings. |
| Next week | Same as last week, hopefully. | Usually typed in again; varies. | Load the day, apply the memorized template, save. New stops land at the end for you to place. |
| A new driver on the route | A list of addresses and a phone number to call. | Whatever was shared to their phone; varies. | The same numbered stops on the crew app, in the saved order, with Map, Arrived and Complete on each. |
| Does the day fit | You find out at 5pm. | Drive time, usually; not the work at each stop. | Check Capacity: estimated hours against an 8-hour crew day, before you add the stop. |
| Rain day | Everybody’s Tuesday becomes Wednesday, by text. | Not covered; it is a map. | Rain / Delay Shift moves the crew’s open visits by a number of days, with a preview that counts them first. |
| Cost | Free, paid in drive time. | Often free for a few stops; route planning tiers vary. | Included in every plan, from $99 a month. |
A map app on the driver’s phone still makes sense for the turn-by-turn directions between two stops, which is what the Map button on each stop opens. The order of the stops, and the record of it, is the part that belongs in the schedule.
What it will not do
Nothing on Route Management rewrites a crew’s day on its own. A suggestion is a preview with an Undo; a template is applied when you apply it; a rain shift runs after you have read the preview. The order the crew sees is the order someone in the office clicked Save Route on, and Schedule History says who. The limits below are the ones the help center states.
Pricing
Scheduling, routes & route memorization is part of the core product, included in the monthly price on Essential, Professional, Premier. Each plan sets how many crews you can route.
| Plan | Price | Routes and memorization | Crews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | $99 a month | Included | Up to 2 crews |
| Professional | $229 a month | Included | Up to 10 crews |
| Premier | $399 a month | Included | Unlimited crews |
New accounts start on a 14-day free trial, no card needed, so you can set up a crew with a depot, load a real day and try a suggestion before you pay. See the pricing page for every feature by plan.
Works together
The calendar, the dispatch board, recurring visits and the Today list the route lands on.
Declare a storm, get a visit for every snow job, and apply the plow route you memorized.
The crew’s side: the day as numbered stops, with Map, Arrived, Job and Complete on each.
How the route connects to customers, jobs, billing and the rest of the system.
For the longer story, our guide to scheduling landscaping crews covers route days, recurring visits and checking whether a day actually fits. Step by step in the help center: Route Management, time-based and route-style crews, the crew depot address, the crew day view, the Weather page and Schedule History.
Questions
Software that puts a crew’s stops for the day into a driving order that wastes less time between properties. Here it is the Route Management page: load a route crew’s day, click Suggest Best Route, and a preview shows your current order beside the suggested one with drive time, miles and the savings. Apply it, adjust any stop by hand, click Save Route.
Yes, when maps are set up on your account. The map draws the current and suggested orders as road lines, each applied stop shows its drive time and miles from the previous one, and route preferences cover fastest or shortest, departure time with planned traffic, and roads to avoid: highways, toll roads, ferries, unpaved roads.
The crew’s Time Based setting must be No; Route Management plans route-style crews only. The crew needs a depot with at least a street address and a city, or the Crew depot start and finish choices are turned off. And maps must be set up on your account, or Suggest Best Route stays greyed out. Reordering by hand, saving and memorizing work without maps.
Up to 148 stops in one suggestion. A stop whose address cannot be found is flagged on its card for you to fix on the job site. If no route fits the roads you asked it to avoid, a Try without avoidances button appears.
Yes. A suggestion is a preview until you click Apply suggestion, Undo puts the order back, and after applying you can drag any stop or use its up and down arrows. The usual routine: let the suggestion find the loop, move the stops you know better than the map, then save.
Yes. With the stops in order, open More actions, click Memorize Route and name it; templates belong to the crew. On a later date, load the day, pick the template from the Memorized Route dropdown and click Apply Template. Stops that were not in the template go to the end for you to place. Then Save Route.
Not on this page. A crew booked into clock times is a time-based crew, and time-based crews do not appear in the Route Management Crew dropdown; they are scheduled on the drag-and-drop calendar covered on the scheduling and dispatch page. Most companies run both: a route-style mowing crew and a time-based install crew.
Rain / Delay Shift, under More actions, moves every open visit for that crew by a number of days, with a preview first that counts the visits and shows the date span. Completed and skipped visits stay put; repeating series never move. For one at-risk visit, the Weather page lists today’s and tomorrow’s visits at risk with a Reschedule button on each.
Stop numbers from the saved route flow through to the crew app’s route and the Route # column on the Visits page. The crew works the day as numbered stops with Map, Arrived, Job and Complete on each, and the statuses they set come back to the office.
Every plan. Scheduling, routes & route memorization is part of the core product on Essential, Professional, Premier, starting at $99 a month. New accounts start on a 14-day free trial, no card needed.
14-day free trial · No credit card required