The three layers of a useful route plan
Window cleaners often use “route” to mean three different things. Keeping them separate prevents a tidy map from hiding a bad diary.
- Round membership: which recurring customers belong together and normally share a day.
- Stop order: the sequence in which that day’s customers should be visited.
- Live navigation: the turn-by-turn directions from the current stop to the next one.
Maps handles the third layer well. A window cleaning route planner earns its place by connecting all three layers to recurring dates, job status and the next visit.
1. Clean the customer locations first
Route output is only as good as the pins. Check incomplete postcodes, duplicated customers, properties pinned in the middle of a postcode and addresses where the written location differs from the real access point.
When a long drive looks wrong, open both pins before blaming the route. A customer pinned to the postcode centre or a similarly named street in another town can distort every sequence. Keep the saved coordinates authoritative once the correct gate, driveway or building entrance has been selected.
- Confirm the town and full postcode.
- Move the map pin to the real service entrance where necessary.
- Remove duplicated or inactive customers from the planning set.
- Keep access notes with the customer, not in a separate paper list.
2. Group the right work into the same round
Put the week on a map before optimising individual days. If two adjacent streets are being visited on different days, moving one block may save more travel than changing the order of either existing route.
Start with obvious clusters—one estate, village or side of town—then check whether their combined cleaning and travel time fits the working day. Do not make a round geographically neat but operationally impossible. The free daily capacity calculator helps test the workload before moving customers.
Recurring cadence remains a customer decision. Grouping four-weekly and eight-weekly work is possible, but only if the dates genuinely align. Do not change a customer’s promised frequency merely to make one week look cleaner.
3. Choose the real start and finish
A route can change when the starting point changes. Decide whether the day begins at home, the unit, a water-fill point, a school-run drop-off or the first commercial customer. Decide whether finishing near home matters or whether the route may end anywhere.
For a team member, use the point from which that worker actually begins. Giving them your own preferred order may create a long first journey before the first paid stop.
4. Optimise the road order
Run road-aware optimisation after the customer set and starting point are correct. Postcode order is not route order, and straight-line distance cannot see one-way streets, rivers, railways or a road that does not connect.
Inspect the proposed sequence on the map. Look for long jumps, repeated crossings and a late return to a street already visited. If the day contains several properties close enough to park once and walk, keep those stops together even if the exact house order has little effect on driving.
RoundRun can optimise the saved stop order for a round while leaving the cleaner in control of manual changes. The Android and web app then uses the saved customer coordinates for navigation.
5. Apply the constraints the map cannot know
The shortest drive can still be the wrong working order. Adjust it for:
- commercial jobs that must be done before opening;
- locked gates, keys and customers with agreed access times;
- school streets, market days and predictable congestion;
- parking that disappears later in the day;
- water refills or equipment collection;
- jobs where a second worker or special equipment is required;
- a sensible place for lunch or the end of the working day.
Record recurring constraints as customer notes. Otherwise the same manual correction has to be remembered every cycle and cannot be handed safely to another cleaner.
6. Save the order and measure the real result
Use the proposed route for several comparable days before declaring it better. Record total travel time, total working time, miles if available, jobs completed and any order changes made on the road.
Compare similar conditions. A wet school-holiday day and a dry term-time day do not prove the route caused the difference. The calculator above is deliberately based on the average journey you observe, not a universal promise.
Once a route works, keep it stable. Re-optimise when several customers are added, the round moves day, the starting point changes or a repeated access problem makes the saved order unreliable. Constantly changing a good sequence creates its own mistakes.
Where should a new customer go?
Do not drop every new enquiry into the day with the lowest job count. Use this sequence:
- Pin the address accurately.
- Find the nearest existing customer clusters.
- Check which matching cadence next aligns with the new customer.
- Check that day’s real time capacity, not only its row count.
- Insert the customer near the relevant streets and re-run the order.
- Review the complete route before confirming the first date.
If every suitable day is full, the honest choices are to change the working day, create another round, raise the minimum viable price for distant work or decline the job. Hiding it inside an already impossible route simply postpones the decision.
Common route-planning mistakes
- Optimising stop order before fixing which customers share the day.
- Sorting by postcode and assuming that represents the roads.
- Using inaccurate postcode-centre pins as customer entrances.
- Ignoring parking, keys, time windows and school traffic.
- Packing the saved travel time with extra work before proving it exists.
- Moving one visit and accidentally shifting every future recurrence.
- Rebuilding a stable route every week for no operational reason.
- Keeping access knowledge in one cleaner’s head instead of customer notes.
Route optimisation is part of the round, not a separate trick
A route becomes commercially useful when it stays connected to the jobs due that day, the customer’s promised cadence, the person doing the work and what happens after completion. A shorter drive that loses a visit, breaks a recurrence or sends a worker to a locked gate is not an improvement.
Use the full round-planning workflow when building or reorganising the diary. If weather has already displaced work, follow the rain-day recovery guide before trying to optimise the destination days.
