Route Optimization
What Route Optimization Does
Route optimization puts a crew’s jobs for one day in an efficient driving order and estimates the drive, arrival and departure time for every stop. It runs per crew, per day, and is included in every plan. Owners and managers build and edit routes.
How It Works
A route starts and ends at your company address unless you set a different start or end for that route. With no company address, the route starts from the first job.
The day starts at your company’s Default job start time (07:00 if you haven’t set one), and each stop is timed from the job’s estimated duration – 30 minutes when a job has none. Only open jobs are routed: completed jobs are listed separately under Completed, and cancelled or skipped visits are left out.
Every job on the route needs an address Jeero can locate. If one can’t be located, the build stops and names the job so you can fix its address.
Building and Optimizing Routes
- From the dashboard – Each crew card has a route icon labelled Optimize (Re-optimize once a route has been built). The View route icon next to it opens the Route page for that crew and day.
- From the Route page – Pick a crew and a date, then click Build route (Rebuild route if one already exists).
A route that is already up to date can’t be rebuilt: the button stays disabled until something changes. With a single job there is nothing to order, so the button reads Calculate travel and Jeero works out the drive to and from that stop.
Each plan has a daily limit on route builds: 5 during the trial, 50 on Starter and Pro, 100 on Business, unlimited on Enterprise. The dashboard and the Route page show what is left (for example 12/50 builds today). Reordering by hand doesn’t use a build, and a single-job route can still be calculated once the limit is reached. See Billing and Plans.
You can also build routes from the mobile app – see Managing on Mobile.
Route Status Indicators
Crew cards on the dashboard and the Route page show one of these badges:
- Optimized – The jobs are in the order Jeero calculated.
- Stale – Something changed since the route was built: a job was added, removed, moved to another day or crew, completed, cancelled or skipped; a job’s estimated duration or locked start time changed; or the route’s start or end address (or your company address) changed. Rebuild to bring it up to date.
- Manually ordered (Manual order on the dashboard) – You rearranged the stops by hand.
Locked Start Times
If a job has a locked start time, Jeero plans the rest of the day around it:
- The job starts at its locked time. If the crew would get there early, every stop after it is timed from the locked time.
- The time before it is filled with other work. Jeero places jobs without a locked time ahead of the locked one for as long as the crew can still get there on time, nearest job first.
- Up to 15 minutes late is accepted.
- Later than that is flagged. The job shows a warning with its locked time and the expected arrival. The route is still built, with the real expected times.
When a job is spread over several days, the locked time applies to each visit at the same time of day.
Free Time
When nothing fits before a locked job, the timeline shows a Free time row ahead of it, with the length of the gap and when the crew needs to leave:
Free time · 1h 40m · leave by 09:50
Free time isn’t a stop and can’t be dragged. It is recalculated whenever the order or the start time changes.
Starting the Day Later
When there are at least 15 minutes of free time before the first locked job of the day, the Route page suggests a later start – for example Start at 08:40. One click moves the route’s start time so the crew reaches the locked job without waiting. Jobs after the locked one keep their times.
Note: Planned times are estimates. Timesheets, job costs and overage alerts use the times your crew actually records in the app.
Setting Start and End Addresses
On the Route page, the timeline begins with a Start row and finishes with an End row. Click the pencil icon on either one to set an address for that route only. Use company address fills in your saved company address; otherwise start typing a street and pick a suggestion.
If you set only a start address, the route also ends there. Changing either address marks a built route Stale.
The time field on the Start row sets the start time for that route only; arrival and departure times update straight away.
Manual Reordering
Drag the stops into the order you want, on the Route page timeline or on a dashboard crew card. Jeero recalculates the drive times, arrival times and any free time for your order and marks the route Manually ordered.
Click Restore optimized order to go back to the last order Jeero calculated.
The Route Map
Each dashboard crew card has a small map of the day’s stops and, once the route is built, the driving path between them, with the total distance and driving time.
The Route page shows a larger map above the timeline. The Navigate icon on a stop opens driving directions to it in Google Maps.