Route planning with multiple stops for trade crews: a practical guide

For a field crew, the route is the schedule. The same six jobs in a bad order cost an extra hour of windscreen time, and an hour a day per van is a hire's worth of capacity across a year. Yet most trade routes are still planned in the order the phone rang. This guide covers the free tools and their real limits, the batching rules that matter more than any app, and the point where route planning becomes a dispatch problem.

The free tools and their honest limits

Google Maps remains the default, and it allows up to nine intermediate stops per route (Google Maps directions help), which covers most trade days. Its catch is that it navigates the order you typed, it does not optimise it; dragging stops around until the line stops crossing itself is the manual workaround everyone uses. Dedicated multi-stop apps optimise the order automatically and handle more stops, but they all share the deeper limitation: they optimise the drive, not the day. No map app knows that the switchboard job must happen while the power authority is on site, that the customer at stop four is only home after two, or that the apprentice cannot do stop six alone.

That knowledge lives in the schedule, which is why route planning bolted onto scheduling beats scheduling bolted onto route planning as soon as constraints appear.

Batching rules that beat any algorithm

Three habits recover most of the available drive time without software. Batch by area first: assign each crew a zone per day rather than a scatter, and hold non-urgent jobs until their zone day, which most customers accept happily when offered a firm day. Anchor the immovables second: put time-fixed jobs, tenant access windows and inspection slots on the plan first, then flow flexible jobs around them in geographic order. Sequence around the depot last: start with the job furthest out and work homeward, because afternoon overruns then land closer to home rather than stranding the crew an hour out at five o'clock.

The counterintuitive one is resisting the urgent-job reflex. Inserting a non-emergency job into today's run because the customer sounded eager typically costs two other customers their windows; offering tomorrow's zone slot keeps three promises instead of breaking two.

Where dispatch software takes over

The upgrade point arrives when the constraints outnumber what a whiteboard holds: multiple crews, licence-dependent jobs, multi-day work and same-day changes. A dispatch board with a live map turns the route problem into a visual one: jobs pinned by location and status, crews filterable on the map, and a change dragged on the board reaching the technician's phone before they leave the previous site. That last part is the quiet killer of paper routes, because a perfect 7am plan degrades by lunchtime and the phone call it takes to redirect each van is itself part of the overhead.

In SKEDS the dispatch board and map are one screen: click a crew name to see only their pins, drag a job to another crew and their day reorders on their phone. Our field service management explainer covers where routing sits in the wider workflow, and the Starter plan is free if you want to see your week on a map before believing any of this.

Measuring whether it worked

Route discipline should show up in numbers within a month: jobs per crew per week up, fuel spend per job down, and the first-appointment punctuality that reviews mention. The simplest measurement costs nothing: for one week, note the odometer at the start and end of each day and divide kilometres by completed jobs. Most crews are shocked by the ratio, and cutting it by a quarter through zoning alone is common. Track it monthly and the number becomes a habit-keeper, because drive-time creep returns the moment intake stops respecting zones, and the odometer tells on it long before the crew complains.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best free route planner for a trade crew?

Google Maps for up to nine stops if you order them yourself. Beyond that, dedicated multi-stop planners optimise order, but none of them see job constraints, which is why they stall as crews grow.

How many jobs per day should one van target?

Divide realistic on-the-tools hours by average job length rather than picking a number. Our crew capacity calculator does it per week; the daily answer follows.

Does SKEDS do turn-by-turn navigation?

SKEDS puts the day's jobs on a live map, in order, with one-tap navigation handing each leg to the phone's map app. The scheduling and status intelligence lives in SKEDS; the turn-by-turn voice stays with the navigation app you already trust.