Map view

Map view draws the plan on a map. Every person and day you have selected becomes a route with numbered stops in driving order, so you can see the shape of a day rather than reading it as a list of times.

What is on the map

One route per person per day, in that person's colour, following the order the stops are actually driven in.

A pin for every stop that has an address we can place.

The person's home or start point, so you can see how far the first and last stops are from where they begin and end.

Days with nothing planned are left off the map entirely. That keeps a week from filling up with lone home pins for people who have no work.

Working with it

Hover a stop to see what the job is, who it is for and when it is planned. Click a route and its full detail opens, the same route panel you get in Route view, so you can go from noticing something odd on the map to fixing it without changing tabs.

Anything you change elsewhere appears here straight away. Drag a stop to a different person in Route view and both routes redraw on the map, which is the quickest way to see whether a move actually helped.

What the map is good for

Spotting a route that crosses itself
A route that doubles back through the same area usually means something is pinned to a time it does not need to be, or that a stop has a time window fighting the geography. The list will not show you this. The map will.

Comparing two people in the same area
If two routes overlap heavily, there is often a swap available that saves both of them driving. Select just those two people for the day and look at where the routes interleave.

Sanity checking before you save
Run auto-plan, then look at the map before you commit. A plan that looks reasonable as numbers but wrong as a picture is usually wrong.

Two things to know

Driving times on the map are only reliable after a run of auto-plan. Optimisation calculates and stores real travel times. Before that, the map works them out from the times on the stops themselves, so they can be approximate or missing. If you want accurate driving times, run auto-plan first.

A stop without a usable address cannot be drawn. It still exists in the plan and still takes up time in the day, it just has no pin. If a route looks shorter on the map than it feels in the list, look for stops with missing addresses.

Checking that it is working

Select three people for one day. Three routes appear, one per person, in different colours.

Give one of them nothing to do. Their route disappears entirely rather than showing a single pin at home.

Click a route. The route detail opens with the same stops in the same order as Route view shows.

Move a stop between two people. Both routes redraw without you reloading the page.