Route view

A route is one employee's day. This page explains what the route view shows and how to change it.

The route header

Each route is headed by the employee's name and the date, with a button to hide it. Underneath are the numbers that show whether the day is realistic:

Total working time: how much of the day is actual work.

Total driving time: how much of it is spent in the car.

The length of the working day, where the employee has a static work week to compare against.

The header also has a control to lock every stop in the route at once, which is the quickest way to protect a day you have already agreed with somebody.

What a stop shows

• The planned time, on the right.

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  A lock, to fix the stop in place.

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  The address, below the title.

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  The transport time, how long there is to get here from the previous stop.

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  The estimate, or planned duration, of the work.

   

   

Transport time is the gap between the end of the previous stop and the start of this one. That is why it can go negative.

Locking

A locked stop is never moved, either by dragging or by the optimiser. Locking is how you mark work that has been agreed with a customer.

Lock too much and the algorithm has nowhere to put the rest, and stops start coming back unplanned.

Locking can produce a plan that looks inefficient but is correct. There is a worked example on Good to know about Tourplanning+.

Calendar appointments

Appointments from the calendar appear in the route in their chronological place, and the algorithm plans around them. They are always locked: you cannot drag them, and the optimiser will not move them, whatever the rest of the route is doing.

They cannot be edited here. Change an appointment where it was created, and Tourplanning+ picks it up.

An appointment's map position comes from its place field. If that field holds something that is not an address, such as a meeting link, the appointment still appears in the route but has no pin on the map.

Overnight stays

Where work is far enough away that driving home and back the next morning costs more than staying over, Tourplanning+ can plan an overnight stay.

You will see two things when it has:

A divider in the route, with text and an icon, so the overnight stay is never something you discover afterwards.

The next day starts from where the employee stopped, not from their home address. The first journey of the following morning is measured from the previous day's last stop.

Overnight stays are not planned unless they have been switched on, and the setting has conditions attached. If you expect one and do not get it, or you get one and do not want it, the answer is on Settings and priority groups rather than here.

The unplanned area

The unplanned area holds work that should be considered but has not been given to anyone. It contains tasks you have added so they get included in the next optimisation, and plannings the algorithm could not fit anywhere.

Add unplanned tasks opens a window where you can pick a single task, or choose a task filter and bring in everything it matches at once. Most planners use the filter route: “everything overdue in this region”, and let the algorithm decide who does what.

The trash icon next to the button empties the area. It clears the tasks you added and leaves any plannings alone, so you can start your selection over without losing real work.

Changing a route by hand

Drag a stop from one route to another to give it to a different employee or move it to a different day. Drag stops within a route to change the order. The map, the times and the transport gaps all redraw as you go.

Right-clicking a stop gives you:

Open task: go to the task itself for the full detail.

Edit planning: adjust this planning.

Delete planning: remove it from the route.

None of this is written until you press Save. Rearranging by hand is as safe as optimising.