A round that made sense five years ago
When you started, the round was two estates and a few streets near your house. Mondays were one estate, Tuesdays the other. Then you took on customers from a leaflet drop across the ring road, a street of bungalows your neighbour's aunt recommended, a few eight-weekly houses in the next village and some commercial work on the high street. Each new customer went into whichever day had room.
Now a normal Wednesday starts on one side of town, jumps across for three houses, comes back, and finishes in the village. You spend more of the day in the van than up a pole, and the round is so tangled that you cannot see how to fix it without upsetting half your customers.
Customers are added by day, not by place
The way most rounds are planned is simple: when a customer says yes, you ask yourself which day has space. That works for the first hundred houses. After that, frequency and geography fight each other.
- Four-weekly, six-weekly and eight-weekly customers are mixed on the same days.
- New customers join the day that has space, not the day that is nearby.
- The round is held in a notebook, a spreadsheet or an app list, but never seen on a map.
- Moving a customer to a better day feels risky, so nobody does it.
- Commercial work with fixed times breaks up otherwise tidy days.
Diesel, time and a ceiling on the round
Every extra mile between houses is fuel and time you are not paid for. Days take longer, so you fit fewer houses and the round earns less per hour than it should. It also puts a ceiling on growth: you cannot add customers because the days are already long, even though the actual cleaning time would fit.
Round planning built on a map
We build a planning tool for your round, working from your existing customer list, or inside your round management app if it exposes your data.
- Every customer is placed on a map from their address, with their frequency, price and usual day.
- The tool shows each day's route and how far it travels, so the tangles are visible.
- It suggests area groupings that keep houses of the same frequency together, while respecting fixed commercial times and customers who must be on a certain day.
- You choose how much to change: a full re-plan, or only moving the worst outliers. Nothing moves until you agree it.
- For customers who move, the tool drafts a polite text or card explaining their new clean day.
- When a new customer signs up, the tool suggests the round day and position that adds the least travel.
| Planning question | Notebook round | Mapped round |
|---|---|---|
| Which day should this new customer go on? | The day with space | The day that adds least travel |
| Why is Wednesday so long? | Hard to say | Visible on the route map |
| Can I take on another street? | Guesswork | See which day it fits |
| Which customers are outliers? | Only a feeling | Highlighted on the map |
If a good round management app already does most of this for you, we will say so and help you set it up rather than building something new.
Days that flow from one street to the next
Each day covers one area, with houses of the same frequency grouped so each four-weekly cycle stays tidy. New customers slot into the right place from the start. You can see where you have capacity and target leaflets there. And when you take on help or a second van, splitting the round becomes a matter of choosing areas on a map.
A normal day then looks like this: you start at the first street in the area, work along in the order the route suggests, and finish near where you began, with the van spending its time parked rather than driving.
Does your round look like this?
- You drive across town several times on the same day.
- New customers go on whichever day has space.
- You have never seen your round on a map.
- Some customers are miles from the rest of their day.
- You feel you cannot take on more work, but your cleaning time is not full.