Getting started: your first schedule
This walks through building a schedule from an empty screen to a finished plan. It takes about ten minutes with a real round in front of you, and you do not need an account to follow along.
6 min read
Before you start
Have a real round to hand rather than test data — a day you have already planned by hand works best, because you can compare the result against what you would have done yourself. You will need the postcodes you visit, roughly how long each visit takes, and the hours your staff work.
Worth knowing
Building your first schedule
- 01
Add the people doing the visiting
Open the scheduler and add each staff member with their name and the postcode they set off from. If someone starts at home rather than the office, set their start location to home — it changes where the scheduler thinks their first journey begins, which often changes the whole shape of their day.
- 02
Set working hours
Give each person a start and end time. These are per-person, so a part-time worker finishing at 13:00 and a full-time colleague finishing at 17:00 can sit in the same run. Nothing will be scheduled outside someone's own hours.
- 03
Add the visits
Add each person to be visited with their postcode and how long the visit takes. Duration matters more than people expect: it is the single biggest driver of how many visits fit in a day, and guessing it low is the usual reason a schedule looks achievable on screen but not in practice.
- 04
Set the day window
Choose the earliest and latest times the working day can run between. This is the outer boundary for everyone. Individual working hours narrow it further per person, and time windows narrow it further per visit.
- 05
Generate
Press Generate. The scheduler assigns every visit to a staff member, orders them to keep driving down, and returns a timed plan. It uses real road distances rather than straight-line estimates, so the travel gaps between visits reflect actual routes.
- 06
Read the warnings before the schedule
If anything could not be placed, it is reported as a warning rather than silently dropped. Read those first — they tell you whether the plan is complete, and usually point at one visit with an impossible constraint rather than a problem with the whole round.
Getting a realistic result
The most common cause of a schedule that looks wrong is a visit duration that has been rounded down. If a visit that really takes 45 minutes is entered as 30, the error compounds across the day, and a round that appears to fit will run late by mid-afternoon. It is worth timing a few real visits before trusting a plan.
The second most common cause is travel expectations. The scheduler uses real road distances, so a visit two miles away across a town centre may cost more time than one five miles down a main road. If a route looks like it doubles back, it is usually because the alternative ordering breaks a time window somewhere else in the day.
Once the basics are working, the guides on call purposes and time windows and double-ups and repeat visits cover the constraints that make real rounds harder than a simple list of stops.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need an account to try it?
- No. Free mode needs no sign-up. You can add up to 2 staff and 10 appointments to see how it behaves on your own postcodes. Creating a Pro account raises that to unlimited staff and up to 100 appointments a day, and adds the calendar for recurring visits.
- Where is my data stored?
- In your own browser, on every plan, and never on our servers. It stays there when you close the tab or restart your computer, so your staff list and clients are waiting next time. It does not sync between devices, and clearing your browsing data removes it — use the export in Settings to keep a backup.
- Do I have to enter full addresses?
- No. A UK postcode is enough to place a visit and calculate travel. You can add a house name or number and a fuller address for the benefit of whoever is doing the visit, but the scheduling itself works from the postcode.
- How long does a schedule take to generate?
- Seconds, for a normal day's round. The slowest part is looking up travel times between postcodes the first time they are used; repeated postcodes are cached, so re-running a round you have already built is faster than the first attempt.
- Can I change a schedule after it is generated?
- Yes. Adjust the inputs — a duration, a time window, someone's hours — and generate again. The scheduler is quick enough that trying two or three variants of a difficult day is practical, which is usually more productive than hand-editing a result.
Related guides
- Staff, skills and start locationsAdd staff, set individual working hours, choose whether someone starts from home or the office, and use skills so visits reach qualified people only.
- Appointments, double-ups and repeat visitsHow to add appointments, request two staff for a double-up, schedule several visits to the same person in one day, and enforce a minimum gap between them.
- Multiple visits a day to the same personSchedule several visits a day to one person with a minimum gap between them — morning, lunch, tea and bed calls — or run without repeat visits at all.
Try it on your own round
The scheduler is free to use with no account — your data stays in your browser until you choose to create one.