[COMPANY NAME]
Nobody should cross the county twice before lunch. Paste the stops, say how many one person covers in a day, and the week comes back charted: each day’s work in one part of the map, in the order to drive it.
One stop per line. Charted takes the last real zip code on the line and treats the rest as the label, so a full street address is fine: the house number will not be mistaken for the zip. Lines beginning with # are ignored.
Give a start point and every run is ordered from there. Leave it blank and each run is ordered as the shortest path between the stops themselves.
This is the one that changes a decision instead of describing it. Ask it before you pick the date, not after.
One line per stop already on the calendar: the day, then the zip. A day label is whatever you call it, a weekday or a date.
Calibrate the road factor once, yourself. Straight-line distance is multiplied by this number to estimate road miles. The 1.3 it ships with is a starting guess, not a measurement. Drive a route you know, compare your odometer against the straight-line figure between those two zips, and put your own ratio here. A grid-plan city runs lower; mountains, rivers and lakes run higher. Until you do that, every mileage on this page is an estimate and should be read as one.
The Production Board builds that line for you on its Settings tab, and a second block there lists a chosen day’s stops ready to paste into the box on the first page. Nothing is linked and no file reads another: you copy, you paste. That is deliberate. A chain of linked files breaks the first time somebody renames one.
Listing them here does not change the grouping. It is so your setup lives in one place, and so you can see at a glance whether you have enough people for the number of runs a day needs.
Bigger than you will ever need. Three thousand stops split into thirty runs takes about thirty milliseconds. A single two-thousand-stop route — one person painting curb numbers all day — takes about three and a half seconds, because putting two thousand stops in the right order is a much harder problem than splitting them into groups. A mowing crew with sixty lawns is instant. There is no limit written into this page and nothing degrades as you add more; it simply takes a little longer to order a very long single run.
How good is the answer? On small days it is provably perfect: tested against every possible arrangement of eight stops, it finds the shortest route exactly. On larger runs it improves the obvious order by another seven to thirteen per cent and keeps going until it cannot find a better swap. It is a strong first draft you are free to overrule. You know which customer will not be home before ten.
It does not know about roads, traffic, bridges or ferries, and it has never driven anywhere. It measures the straight line between two zip code centres and multiplies it. A zip centre is the middle of the zip, not your customer’s driveway, and the typical US zip sits about three miles from its nearest neighbour, so two stops it calls tight could still be a few miles apart. It is built to tell you which stops belong in the same day and in what order. It is not built to tell you how long the drive takes.
It holds every one of the 42,789 US zip codes with a known location, including Alaska, Hawaii and the territories. Nothing is looked up online. This page works with no internet connection, stores everything in your own browser, and sends nothing anywhere.
[COMPANY NAME] · Internal use only. Provided for business use. Not legal, tax or accounting advice. Distances are estimates produced from zip code centre points.