Route optimization
Less time in the car, more homes cleaned
Drive time is unpaid work for your business, and it's often paid work for your cleaners. Reorder each cleaner's or team's day or week using real drive times, from wherever they start to wherever they finish.
Optimized
38 min
total drive, was 71
1Alvarez
2Park
3Ross
4Nguyen
5Chen
Real drive times
Routes use actual driving times, not straight lines on a map.
Day or week
Tidy up tomorrow, or rebalance a whole week of recurring cleans.
Start and end points
Routes begin at the office or a cleaner's home, and end wherever they need to.
Routes that respect how cleaners work
A route for a cleaner who starts at home in the north suburbs and needs to finish by school pickup is different from one for a team that starts and ends at the office with the van. Set start and end points per cleaner or team, and optimization orders the stops around them.
Optimize a single day when you're finalizing tomorrow, or a whole week when you're taking on new recurring clients. The map view shows the result before you commit, so you can keep a client's preferred time where it matters.
- Optimize per cleaner or per team
- Day or week at a time
- Custom start and end points
- Map view to review before saving
Drive time you can see and plan around
Buffers and drive time are shown separately on the schedule, so you know whether a gap is padding or travel. When a new client books online, the max drive time setting keeps the booking page from offering slots that would stretch a route across town.
When a cleaner heads out, one-tap directions in the field app open the next stop, and an on-my-way text sends the client an ETA. GPS waypoints on time-tracking actions give you a record of when each cleaner arrived and left.
- Buffers and drive time shown separately
- Max drive time on online booking
- One-tap directions and on-my-way texts
- Drive time as its own time-tracking category
Growth depends on density
Adding clients far from your existing routes adds hours of driving, not hours of cleaning. Looking at your week on the map shows where your homes cluster and where a single outlier drags a whole team across the county.
Use that to decide which requests to accept, which neighborhoods to market to, and when a second crew in a new area would pay for itself. The CFO module can model that scenario with your real numbers.
Route density also changes how you price. A home that sits between two existing clients costs you little extra drive time. The same home forty minutes away eats most of the margin on a standard clean. Job costing and the job profitability report show labor, including drive time, against revenue per job, so you can see which areas pay and which only look busy.
A day with maid.co
The team that got an hour back
Say a three-person team has five recurring cleans on Wednesdays, booked over two years in whatever order clients asked. The route zigzags across the river twice. Your office manager runs route optimization for that team's Wednesday, with the office as start and end.
The new order finishes earlier, with the client who needs a morning clean kept first. She reviews it on the map, saves it, and uses 'update all future visits' on the recurring jobs so every Wednesday follows the new route. Clients whose times shifted get notified. The time saved becomes room for another clean.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Does route optimization use real drive times?
Yes. Routes are calculated using real driving times between addresses, not straight-line distance, and they account for each cleaner's or team's start and end points. That matters for cleaning companies working across rivers, highways and neighborhoods where two homes that look close on a map can be twenty minutes apart.
Can I optimize a whole week, not just today?
Yes. Optimize a single day for a cleaner or team, or a full week. Weekly optimization is useful when you're onboarding new recurring clients or rebalancing teams, since most maid companies' schedules are mostly recurring work that repeats every week or two.
What if a client needs a specific time?
Review the optimized route on the map before saving it, and keep fixed appointments where they need to be. Arrival windows also give you flexibility, since a client with a 9-to-noon window can move within it without breaking any promise you made.
Will my cleaners get directions?
Yes. The field app offers one-tap directions to each stop, opening in the navigation app on the cleaner's phone. They can also send an on-my-way text with an ETA to the client. The field app is an installable web app that also works offline for viewing jobs and filling checklists.
How do I track drive time for payroll?
Time tracking includes drive, shop and office categories alongside time on the job. Cleaners clock in and out and switch categories, and approved timesheets feed payroll prep, including overtime rules. Payroll is prepared and exported to your payroll provider, which runs the actual pay.
Keep exploring
Run your whole cleaning company from one place.
Try every module free for 30 days. No card, no setup fee, and we'll help you bring your clients over.