How to plan weekly and recurring service routes

Assign customers to days by area: split your service area into one zone per working day, and every customer in a zone gets that day. A Tuesday that stays in one part of town has short drives between stops. A Tuesday built from whoever called first crosses town all day, every week, for as long as those customers stay.

1. 1

   Put every customer on one map

   Import the customer list you bill from. In EZRoutePlanner the import finds the address columns, even when they're split, and you pick the customer name as each stop's label.

2. 2

   Look for natural clusters

   Most service businesses have dense pockets: a few subdivisions, a lake, an older part of town. Each pocket wants to be one day, not split across two.

3. 3

   Draw the zones

   Five working days means five zones. Lasso each one and create a route named for its day. A big pocket may need two days; sparse edges can share one.

4. 4

   Check the size of each day

   Count the stops and the time on site in each zone. If Monday has 28 visits and Friday has 9, move the border between them.

How long visits run changes how many fit in a zone. Trade-specific advice is on our pages for lawn care, pool service, pest control, house cleaning and window cleaning.

Plan biweekly visits as two alternating weeks, an A week and a B week. Each service day gets two routes, Tuesday A and Tuesday B. Weekly customers go on both; each biweekly customer goes on one. A stop can sit in more than one route, so a weekly customer doesn't need to be entered twice.

Balance the two weeks as you assign. If biweekly customers split evenly between A and B, both Tuesdays run about the same length, and the crew's day doesn't swing between easy and brutal.

• Name routes by day and week, like Tue A and Tue B, so nobody runs the wrong one.
• Keep the A/B calendar somewhere everyone sees it: the shop whiteboard, a shared calendar or your scheduling app.
• Monthly customers go on one of four rotations, weeks 1 to 4. With only a few, add each one to its week's route by hand.

Save one route per service day and run that route every week. EZRoutePlanner has no recurring schedule or calendar, so it won't move a customer to next Tuesday for you. Instead, the saved Tuesday route is the schedule: open it, check for changes, and send it out.

• Plan on several saved routes. A weekly schedule is about 5 routes, or 10 with A/B weeks. Paid plans keep unlimited routes at once, from $20 a month; the free plan has unlimited routes too, kept one at a time.
• The same link every week. A route's share link opens the current version of the route, so a tech can keep Tuesday A bookmarked on their phone.
• Find a customer's day fast. The Address Book searches every saved customer and filters by route, so you can see which day someone is on.
• Archive customers who pause for the season, so they're out of the way until they come back.

Put a new customer on the day whose route already passes closest to them. See where their pin lands among the colored routes, add them to that route, and press Optimize Route again. They'll fall into the order where they add the least extra distance, which is rarely the end of the list.

1. Add the address by search, by pasting it, or with a click on the map.
2. Find the nearest route. Their pin sits among one day's stops, or between two.
3. Add and re-optimize. Add the stop to that route and optimize. Compare the total distance before and after.
4. Mind the day's length. If that day is already full, try the next-nearest day before you squeeze them in.

If a new customer is far from every route, that's worth knowing before you quote. The distance of each leg shows what reaching them really costs: price it in, or hold the slot until that area has more customers.

Fold the lost day into the days next to it with a one-off route, and leave the regular routes alone. Lasso the missed customers together with the catch-up day's own customers, create a temporary route, optimize it, and delete it once the week is done. Next week, the saved routes are exactly as they were.

• Split a big missed day. Send the half nearest Wednesday's zone to Wednesday and the rest to Thursday, each as its own catch-up route.
• Holidays are known in advance. Build the catch-up routes the week before, and tell customers their new day.
• Keep A and B weeks in step. A rainout doesn't change which week is which; the next Tuesday is still the one on the calendar.

Re-plan the zones when the customer list has drifted: usually once a season, or after a batch of new or lost customers. Adding customers one at a time keeps each route tight, but over months the days slide out of balance.

Running more than one crew? Split each day's zone between crews the same way you split the week; planning routes for multiple drivers covers it.