How to schedule appointments by location

Because every booking decides tomorrow's drive. Booking whoever calls first, at whatever time they ask for, scatters a day across your whole territory. Booking by area keeps each day in one part of town, so more of it goes to paid work instead of driving.

Median distance saved by putting stops in route order

39%

Median driving time saved

36%

Example routes measured on real roads

48

Those figures come from our 48 example routes of 7–12 stops on real roads in 24 cities, comparing a random order with the optimized one. Booking by area saves more on top, because the stops in each day start out closer together.

Put every customer on one map, find the clusters, and give each cluster its own days. A zone should hold about a day's work, not a fixed slice of the map.

1. 1

   Map your customers

   Import the customer list from your booking app or spreadsheet. In EZRoutePlanner, the import finds the address columns and you pick the customer name as each pin's label.

2. 2

   Find the clusters

   Most mobile businesses have dense pockets: a few neighborhoods, a suburb, the side of town near home. Each pocket wants to be one zone, not split between two.

3. 3

   Draw one zone per working day

   Lasso each area and create a route named for it, such as North, Mon/Thu. A busy area can get two days a week; thin edges can share one.

4. 4

   Size zones by time, not area

   A dense zone covers a few square miles and a rural one covers a county. What matters is that each holds a day of jobs and driving.

5. 5

   Tell customers the days

   Put the zone days on your booking page or website, such as "We're on the east side on Tuesdays and Fridays", so customers pick from them.

Offer the days you'll already be nearby, before you look at the rest of the calendar. Look up the address first; the time comes second.

1. 1

   Find their zone

   Search the address or click it on the map, and see which zone's pins it sits among.

2. 2

   Offer that zone's days first

   Give two or three times on those days. Most customers take one of them.

3. 3

   Check the day's route

   Add the stop to that day's route and press Optimize Route. If it adds a long leg, offer the next day in that zone instead.

4. 4

   Keep an outlier slot

   Hold one slot a week, at the edge of the nearest zone's day, for customers outside every zone, or charge a travel fee to reach them.

"We're in your neighborhood on Tuesdays and Fridays. Would Tuesday morning or Friday afternoon suit you better?"

Order the day's stops first, then give each customer a time that follows that order. If you set the times first, the clock decides the order, and no optimizer can shorten a day whose stops must come in a fixed sequence.

1. 1

   Optimize the day

   Put the day's stops in one route, set the start at home or your base, choose a round trip if you end there, and press Optimize Route.

2. 2

   Read the drive between stops

   Every plan shows the distance of each leg, and paid plans add drive times.

3. 3

   Add the job lengths

   Add how long each appointment takes. EZRoutePlanner doesn't book appointments or add time on site, so this step happens in your calendar.

4. 4

   Add a buffer

   Leave 10 to 15 minutes between jobs for parking, a job that runs long and traffic, and more in a city.

5. 5

   Give arrival windows

   Tell each customer a window of an hour or two around their arrival time. A window absorbs a long job earlier in the day; an exact time doesn't.

Fill the gap from the same zone and move the reschedule to that customer's zone days. Every change made inside a zone keeps the day tight; changes across zones are what undo it.

• Keep a short waitlist per zone. When a Tuesday slot opens, the first call goes to east-side customers who wanted an earlier date.
• Pull a later booking forward from the same zone before you offer the gap to anyone across town.
• Re-optimize only when the stops change. Same stops, same order; a new or cancelled stop means pressing Optimize Route again and resending any times that moved.
• Recurring customers stay on their zone day. A regular every four weeks books into the same zone's day, and planning weekly service routes covers keeping those days balanced.

Two jobs, often two tools: a calendar or booking app that holds the times, and a route planner that holds the map and the order. Field service software does both, at a higher price.

If customers book themselves online and the route should follow along, field service software such as Jobber keeps both in one place; see Jobber vs EZRoutePlanner. If you take bookings by phone or text, a calendar plus a route planner is enough, and what route planning software costs compares the options.

The method is the same everywhere. What changes is how many jobs fit in a day, and so how big each zone can be.

• [Mobile pet grooming](/for/mobile-pet-grooming): 5 to 8 full grooms a day at 1 to 2 hours each. One groom across town costs a whole slot, so zone days matter most.
• [Mobile notaries](/for/mobile-notaries): 2 to 5 loan signings a day, often booked the same day. Check where an offer falls before you accept it.
• [Home health](/for/home-health): 4 to 7 skilled visits a day, some at fixed times. Order the flexible visits around the fixed ones.
• [Home inspectors](/for/home-inspectors): 2 to 3 inspections of 2 to 4 hours. Book them in the same area so the drive between them stays short.
• [Mobile mechanics](/for/mobile-mechanics): 3 to 6 jobs a day plus parts runs, which go in the same route as stops.
• [Mobile detailing](/for/mobile-detailing) and [house cleaning](/for/cleaning-services): a few long jobs a day per team, where one far job can push the whole day late.