Scheduling software for community visits

Most scheduling tools assume everyone turns up to the same building. GeoRoutes is built for the opposite: services where the work happens at other people's addresses, and where the time spent driving between them is a large part of the working day.

That covers more job titles than it first appears. Home care and reablement services use it for morning, lunch, tea and bed call rounds. District and community nursing teams use it for insulin, dressings and other visits that have to happen inside a clinical window. Occupational therapy and physiotherapy services use it for longer assessment and rehab visits, where four appointments can still fill a day once travel is counted. Housing officers, support workers and mobile engineers face the same problem in a different uniform.

This is the case most route planners cannot express, and the one GeoRoutes was built around. Ordinary planners assume one stop per address: ask for the same address four times, spaced across the day, and the efficient answer becomes “do all four while you are there” — which is exactly what nobody wants.

Here you say how many visits a person needs and the least time that must pass between them. Someone on morning, lunch, tea and bed calls gets four separate visits at sensible intervals, routed around every other client on the round. Each one can have its own length, its own part of the day, and its own requirement for two carers rather than one.

None of it is compulsory. Visits required defaults to one, and a service doing a single visit per person never touches the setting — the same scheduler simply behaves as a straightforward route planner. Mixed rounds work too: one client on four calls alongside twenty on one is an ordinary day. How repeat visits are set up covers it in full.

Planning a round by hand is manageable until the constraints start interacting. One client needs two carers at the same time. Another needs four separate calls a day, spaced at least three hours apart. A third can only be seen by someone signed off on their equipment. One visit has to happen at 8am because of a medication interval, and everything else has to fit around it.

Each rule is easy on its own. Together they produce a puzzle where changing one visit shifts everything after it, and where the difference between a good ordering and a poor one is measured in hours of driving across a week. That is the part GeoRoutes takes over.

You enter your staff — where they start from, the hours they work, any breaks they are owed, and what they are trained to do. You enter the visits, with a postcode, a duration and whatever rules apply: how many staff are needed, how many calls a day, the minimum gap between them, and the part of the day they belong in.

The scheduler then assigns every visit to a suitable person and puts them in an order that keeps travel down, using real road distances from the OpenRouteService routing network rather than straight-line estimates. UK postcodes are geocoded automatically. Breaks are reserved before visits are placed, so a round is built around someone's lunch rather than lunch being squeezed into whatever is left.

Anything that could not be scheduled is reported as a warning naming the specific visit, rather than quietly dropped — so you can see whether a day is genuinely over capacity or just over-constrained. The result is a timed plan per person, drawn on a map, which can be opened as a multi-stop route in Google Maps or Apple Maps or sent to staff as a read-only link.

GeoRoutes plans and routes visits. It is not a care records system: it holds no care plans, medication records, risk assessments or clinical notes, and it is not a substitute for the system your service uses to record what happened on a visit. Teams normally keep whatever records system they already have and use this to build the rounds those records describe.

It also will not invent capacity. If a day genuinely has more work than hours, the scheduler will say so rather than produce a plan that only works on paper.

You can build a schedule without creating an account. Free mode supports up to 2 staff and 10 appointments and never sends your data to our servers — it stays in this browser, and is still here when you come back. That is enough to test the behaviour against a real day you have already planned by hand, which is the fairest comparison.

A Pro account removes those limits and adds the calendar for recurring visits and future dates. It does not change where your data lives — that stays in your browser either way, so cancelling never deletes it.

The help guides walk through setting up staff and skills, double-up calls and repeat visits, and time windows — plus how home care, district nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy services each tend to configure things. How it works covers the process end to end.