How to plan routes?
Short answerPlan routes by grouping stops into zones, entering honest job lengths, locking the hard appointment times, ordering the rest by drive time, and leaving slack. Then compare the plan with what happened and adjust. The review step is what makes the next plan better.
The explanation
Planning is a loop, not a one-time task. The first plan will be wrong in small ways, and the notes from the day teach you where. Treat each week as a draft you improve. Keep the notes short: which stop ran long, which road was slow, and which customer was not home.
Start with the customers who have constraints: fixed times, gate access or a preferred day. Those are placed first. The flexible work fills the gaps in a way that keeps the crew in one area for as long as possible.
Leave slack on purpose. A day with no buffer turns every late arrival into a chain of late arrivals. A thirty minute gap in the middle of a long day is cheap insurance. Write down the plan you used as well. Without a record, you cannot tell whether the following month is better or only different.
Steps
- Group customers into zones by neighborhood and assign each crew a zone for each day of the week.
- Enter a realistic job length for each service, using last month's actual times and not your hopes.
- Place visits with fixed times or access limits first, since they cannot move.
- Order the remaining stops by drive time, starting from where the crew begins the day.
- Add a buffer after any stop likely to run long, and keep one gap for emergencies.
- After the day, note where the crew ran late and adjust the job lengths or the zone.
How Apex does it
In progress
Part of this is built. The rest is not. Status as of 2026-10-07; the badge shows the least-built feature involved.
Apex includes a daily route optimization and shows drive time between jobs, and it works toward scheduling by zone. Zone scheduling is partly built, and the owner reviews any reordered day.
- SC34Scheduling by territory / zone(In progress)
- SC05Route optimization (daily)(Built)
- SC28Drive-time between jobs shown(Built)
Apex Flow Scheduler is in early access. See how we label status.
Where this question comes from: owners type it, or a close variant, into search boxes. It was returned by public search suggestions (Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo) when we collected them on 2026-10-06. We do not have search volumes.