Round planner
Puts a day’s jobs in the order that drives shortest, and works out what time each customer would be seen. Premium.
It learns your roads
Turning distance into time needs a speed, and that used to be a number typed into a box — one figure for a whole town, applied equally to a school run at half past three and an empty lane on a Sunday.
Now every time somebody finishes one job and starts the next, the gap between those two timestamps is recorded: a measured journey between two known addresses. The planner uses the middle of your own journeys. No routing service, no monthly fee, and no addresses sent anywhere.
It says nothing until it has eight journeys to go on, because an estimate from three would be worse than the assumption it replaced. Until then the typed figure is used, and the screen tells you how many have been recorded.
On the walker’s phone
The same plan appears in the staff app under More → My round, numbered in driving order with the minutes between each stop. It is read-only there: changing the order changes times customers have been promised, and that belongs here where the consequences are shown.
If it shows you nothing
The planner needs three things, and the top of the screen lists whichever are missing: a base postcode for your business, so a round has somewhere to start and finish; postcodes on your customers, because anyone without one cannot be placed on a map; and a handful of journeys to learn from, which happens on its own.
The list names the customers missing a postcode rather than counting them, and disappears once everything is in place — a checklist that stays on screen after it is satisfied stops being read.
Splitting a day between the team
Choose everyone rather than one person and the planner also suggests who should do what. Each job goes to whoever’s round grows least by taking it, and the rounds are seeded in different parts of town first — without that, cheapest-insertion hands the whole day to one van and leaves the other idle, because opening a new round always looks dearer than adding to an existing one.
It is a suggestion with no Apply button, deliberately. Moving a job to a different walker is a decision about who has met the dog, who holds the key and who the customer asked for. None of that is in a distance calculation, so the planner proposes and you decide.
Anyone already given a time is left where they are and marked with a star. And two rounds always cover more total distance than one — each van goes out and comes back — so do not read the totals as a saving. They are the only way two people can work the same day.
Customers who have been told
Anyone already sent a confirmation or a reminder is marked. Moving them is not free, whatever the map says — they have to be told again, and the planner counts how many that would be before you apply anything.
Example
A walker with six stops finds the planner puts them in a loop rather than the order they were booked, saving four miles — and because the drive times come from journeys actually made in that town, the day it proposes is one that can be done.
FAQ
Where do the travel times come from?
Journeys between your own completed jobs. When one finishes and the next begins, that gap is a measured drive between two known addresses.
Does it use Google Maps?
No. Nothing is sent to a mapping service and there is no bill. It measures point to point rather than along roads, which reads slower in a town split by a river and is the right way round for planning.
It still says it is using the typed figure.
Not enough journeys yet — it needs eight. The count is on the planner screen, and it switches over on its own.
What does it ignore?
Anything that is not a journey: two flats in the same block, a gap longer than forty-five minutes, or a distance implying ninety miles an hour, which means a wrong postcode.
A customer is missing from the plan.
They have no postcode, so they cannot be placed on the map. The planner names them rather than counting them, so you can see who to fix.
Can walkers re-order their own round?
No, deliberately. Re-ordering changes promised times; the app shows the plan and the admin decides it.
How do I see the round on my phone?
Staff app, More → My round. It appears for walkers and sitters and shows today’s jobs numbered in driving order, with the minutes between each stop and a mark against anyone already given a time.
Why does the split give one person more miles?
It balances the work, not the mileage. Somebody covering an outlying village will always drive further than somebody with a tight cluster, and evening out the miles would mean sending both of them across town.