Staff, skills and start locations
Staff records do more than name who is working. Start location, individual hours and skills each change which visits a person can be given, and getting them right is what makes the difference between a schedule that is technically valid and one your team can actually work to.
7 min read
The staff record
Each staff member holds the following. Only the name and a start postcode are strictly required, but the rest is where the useful behaviour comes from.
- Name
- How the person appears on the schedule and the map. Each staff member is also given a colour, which is used consistently across the route lines, the map pins and the results list so you can follow one person's day at a glance.
- Home postcode
- Where the person lives. Used as the origin of their first journey when their start location is set to home, and as the destination of their last.
- Office postcode
- Your base. Used the same way when the person starts from the office. Teams that hold equipment or notes centrally usually start everyone here even if they live elsewhere.
- Start location
- Whether this person begins the day from home or from the office. This is per-person rather than a global setting, because mixed teams are normal — a nurse collecting supplies starts at base while a support worker goes straight out.
- Working hours
- The person's own start and end time. Nothing is scheduled outside them. These sit inside the overall day window, so the effective working period is whichever is narrower.
- Skills
- What this person is signed off to do. A visit that requires a skill will only be given to staff who hold it. Staff with no skills recorded can still take any visit that requires none.
Using skills well
Skills are a hard constraint. A visit requiring a skill will never be assigned to someone without it, which is exactly what you want for anything governed by competency or safeguarding — but it also means over-using them will make your schedule fail to fill.
The practical guidance is to record a skill only when it genuinely determines eligibility. If a visit could be done by anyone but is usually done by a particular person, that is a preference, not a skill, and encoding it as one will make the scheduler refuse reasonable plans.
A common mistake
When someone cannot be given any work
If a staff member comes back with an empty or very light day, the cause is nearly always one of three things. Their working hours may be too narrow to fit a visit plus the travel to reach it. Their start location may put them far from the cluster of visits, making every assignment expensive relative to a colleague. Or the visits they could take may all require a skill they do not hold.
Widening their hours by half an hour, or checking their start postcode, resolves most cases.
Frequently asked questions
- How does skill matching actually work?
- A visit is only assigned to a staff member who holds every skill that visit requires. It is a strict check rather than a preference, so if nobody available holds the required skill, the visit is reported as unplaceable rather than being given to someone unqualified.
- What should I use skills for?
- Anything that determines who is allowed to do a visit rather than who would prefer to. Typical examples are clinical competencies like insulin administration, catheter care or PEG feeding; equipment sign-offs such as hoist or stairlift use; and non-clinical requirements like a driver with a van, a female worker where that has been requested, or a specific language.
- Can one person start from home and another from the office?
- Yes, and this is the normal case. Start location is set per staff member, so a team where some collect equipment from base and others drive straight to their first visit is handled without any workaround.
- Why does start location change the schedule so much?
- Because it moves the origin of the first journey, which changes which visit is cheapest to do first, which cascades through the rest of the day. Someone living on the far side of your patch may be the obvious person for the visits near them, but only if they start from home.
- Can staff have different hours on different days?
- Working hours are set per staff member for the round you are building. To plan a day where someone works different hours, adjust their hours before generating that day's schedule. Pro accounts keep your staff list saved, so this is an edit rather than a re-entry.
- How many staff can I add?
- Free mode allows 2, which is enough to see how the scheduler splits work between people. Pro accounts have no staff limit.
Related guides
- Getting started: your first scheduleA step-by-step walkthrough for building your first optimised schedule in GeoRoutes, from adding staff to reading the finished route.
- 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.