Planning rounds

A day of one driver's drops, in the order they are best done. The multi-drop sheet, with the map doing the part somebody used to do with a biro and local knowledge.

The question you have at seven in the morning

The map is the page. Down the side, one row per driver with their patch and the van they will take. A driver with a round planned shows it, its colour, how many stops and whether it has left. A driver still to plan shows a Plan button. Somebody on holiday or off sick shows as off today and greys out. Same list, one answer: who is out, and who is not.

Pins are orders. Grey is waiting, numbered blue is on the round you have open, green is delivered, black is a base such as the yard or a driver's home.

Patches, so the planner knows whose work is whose

A patch is the area a driver covers, written as one line: KT3, KT4, Epsom, Surrey. Anything that looks like the start of a postcode matches every address beginning that way; anything else is a place name and matches the borough, county or region the postcode belongs to. Give a patch to a driver and the van they usually take picks it up, so moving a driver to another van, or handing their patch to a colleague while they are off, is one change rather than retyping anything onto the vehicle.

One press to plan, and it says what it could not do

Plan takes every order waiting for that day inside a driver's patches and puts the stops in the best order the router can find, in the van they usually take, starting and finishing at that van's base. Plan for everyone does it for every driver not marked off, and then tells you plainly what it could not manage: how many orders were left waiting, who got no van, who could not be planned for want of a base.

Open a round and its stops are listed in order with roughly what time the van reaches each one. Move a stop up or down when you know something the router does not, such as who opens late, or hand it back for the best order again. A drop can be handed to another vehicle by dragging it onto that driver.

Whether it actually fits

A round is only a plan if the van can carry it and the driver can do it in a day, so every round is checked against both.

• Weight and space. Each product carries what one weighs full and the room it takes; each vehicle carries its payload and load space. The round shows kilos against payload and litres against space, warns once the load passes nine tenths of either, and shows an error once it is over. A product with no weight recorded counts as nothing, and the round says how many items it could not weigh, so nobody trusts a total that is missing half the load.
• Hours. Loading, driving, a stop at every door, the minutes each item takes to carry in, and the break. A driver's hours come from their shift pattern for that day, so somebody who starts earlier on Mondays is planned that way. The round says when it leaves and when the van should be back, in red if that is after the day ends.

Over any of those and the driver's row says so in red before the round is even opened, and by how much: 120 kg, 300 litres, forty minutes. Enough to know whether to take off one drop or five.

A van over its plated weight

The planner will not do this to you: it fills a round and then takes drops off until what is left fits, handing back what came off and why. It happens when somebody builds a round by hand because a customer rang. A van over its plated weight is one nobody may legally drive, so the round does not leave you with a red number. It offers the two things a dispatcher actually does: swap the heavy drop with a lighter one on a van that has room, showing only swaps that genuinely fix it without pushing the other round over, or take a drop off, listed heaviest first, with the other rounds that day that have room for it and the next day that door will take a delivery.

Real roads, and honest estimates

Distances, drive times and the line on the map follow the roads. Every stop gets a time of day from that, which is what the customer's tracking page and the two-hour window are built on. They are estimates and the page says so rather than pretending to a precision nobody has.

Out, and back

Sending a round to its driver puts it on their phone. Marking the vehicle as left fixes the stops, because the driver has the list in their hand and the office moving things about underneath them helps nobody. It also loads the round's stock onto the van and tells each customer their gas is on its way. Both that and marking the round done can be taken back, for the thumb that slipped.

More than one person planning at once

Several people can plan the same day. You see who else is on it, their changes as they make them, their pointer with their name on it, and which round they have open, and you can follow them. If two people change the same round at the same moment, Bottle refuses the second rather than quietly losing one of them.

A practice round before you touch anything real

The first time you open Rounds, Bottle offers a practice: a pretend business with a yard, two drivers and a dozen orders for today. It walks you through a whole day a step at a time, from opening the waiting orders to planning everyone, moving a drop between drivers, sending the round, loading the van on the driver's phone and delivering the first drop. Nothing in practice is real: no order is saved, nobody is emailed, and your own rounds are never touched.

What happens next

The round lands on the driver's phone. What the driver records feeds stock and invoicing.