Route planning for service businesses: the complete guide

A service truck earns money in driveways and loses it between them. Every hour your crew spends driving is an hour you pay wages, burn fuel, and depreciate a vehicle while billing exactly nothing. Windshield time is usually the biggest expense a field service business never sees on a report — so let's put numbers and a method on it.

What windshield time actually costs

Take a modest example: one two-person crew, $28/hour combined loaded labor cost each ($56/hour for the truck), doing seven jobs a day. If poor sequencing adds just 45 minutes of unnecessary driving per day — an ordinary amount for improvised routing — that's roughly $42/day in wages, plus fuel, times five days, times fifty weeks: over $11,000 a year per crew, before counting the jobs you didn't fit in.

The insidious part is that a bad route doesn't feel bad. Every individual hop makes local sense ("Miller's is sort of on the way"). Bad routing is the accumulation of dozens of small detours no one ever sees at once.

The four principles of a good route day

1. Cluster by geography before scheduling by request. The most expensive habit in field service is letting customers pick arbitrary days. When a customer in the northeast corner of your territory asks for "Tuesday," the cheap answer is "we're in your neighborhood Thursdays — morning or afternoon?" Most customers care about which part of the day, not which day. Steer them into your geography and whole hours reappear.

2. Anchor the fixed points, float the rest. Some jobs have hard windows — a tenant meeting you at 2:00, a commercial site that only allows morning access. Place those first. They're the skeleton of the day. Every flexible "anytime" job then gets sequenced around the anchors, never the other way. Chaos enters a schedule the moment a movable job gets treated as fixed.

3. Respect job-duration honesty. Routing fails when the durations feeding it are fantasy. If the Hendersons' cleaning always runs 2.5 hours but the schedule says 2, every stop after it inherits the lie. Track actuals for your common job types and re-base your defaults quarterly.

4. Plan the day the night before. Morning routing happens under time pressure with the crew standing there, and it shows. A route built the evening prior gets five calm minutes of scrutiny — and the crew can see their day, and its order, before they leave home.

When software beats the whiteboard

Under about five stops per truck, a human with local knowledge routes nearly as well as an algorithm. The crossover comes fast, though: at seven-plus stops with mixed time windows, the number of possible orderings runs into the thousands, and humans reliably leave 20–40 minutes on the table. This is a pure computation problem, which is why it's one of the few things in business software that's simply solved.

The practical bar for routing software: it should honor your fixed-time jobs as constraints (not shuffle them), it should route each crew separately, and it should let you drag the result around afterward — because the algorithm doesn't know about the dog, the gate code, or the customer who talks. JobVivi's route optimization works exactly this way, built on Google's routing engine, and it's included in every paid plan rather than sold as a logistics add-on.

A note on the on-my-way text

Routing has a customer-facing dividend that's easy to miss: predictability. When the day's sequence is planned, arrival estimates stop being wishes. Pair a real route with automatic on-my-way notifications and you've eliminated the single most common customer complaint in home services — the four-hour window spent hostage to a doorbell. That reliability shows up, verbatim, in reviews.

Plan tonight, cluster your territory, anchor the fixed jobs, and let the math handle the rest. The $11,000 is already in your operation; routing is just how you pick it up.