How route optimization decides

Tap Optimize and a lot happens in a few seconds. Understanding the inputs makes the output predictable instead of magical.

What goes in

For the chosen date, the optimizer gathers every pool that is due (see Schedules run the show for the due rules), then plans around:

• Locations: real drive distances between stops, not straight lines.
• Estimated minutes per stop: from each schedule. Wrong numbers here are the top cause of days that look fine on paper and run late in real life.
• Preferred tech on a schedule, when set.
• Start points: the business address from Settings, or each tech's own start location from My Account, My Start Location. A tech who leaves from home should set this; it changes route order meaningfully.
• Business hours and holidays: closed days are not planned, and visits that would land on a holiday shift to an adjacent open day.

What it will never touch

• A route a tech has started or finished. In-progress and completed days are locked, full stop.
• A day you adjusted by hand. Dragging stops or moving them on the calendar marks the day as manually adjusted, and later optimization passes leave it alone. Your judgment outranks the algorithm.
• Pools without map coordinates, paused pools, and prospects. Invisible to routing by design.

Reading the result

Each stop gets an estimated arrival time, and the route card shows total drive time versus service time. A day with more driving than servicing is a layout problem worth a look at the Map view: usually one outlier pool that belongs on a different day.

The due-pools callout

Above the route list, an amber callout lists pools that are due that day but sitting on no route (added after optimization ran, freshly unpaused, just geocoded). Nothing silently slips; that callout is the catch basin. You can drag those pools straight onto a tech's lane in the calendar's day view.

Honest limits

There is no undo for an optimization pass. If you had a hand-tuned day and re-optimized it, the old order is gone, which is exactly why touched days get locked. When in doubt, use the calendar to move individual stops instead of re-running the whole day.