Intelligent routing
Any booking tool can fill a hole in the calendar. The question that costs you money is which hole. A slot that is legitimately open can still be forty minutes the wrong way — and a stranger booking online has no idea where your trucks already are.
Core booking vs intelligent routing
Which times get offered?
Core booking Every start where the job fits your hours on a free truck.
Intelligent routing The subset that also keeps the truck near the work it's already doing that day.
Does it know where the job is?
Core booking No. An address is an address.
Intelligent routing Yes — the address resolves to a zone, and the zone is what placement is judged on.
What happens to the drive?
Core booking Nothing. A legitimate slot can still be forty minutes the wrong way.
Intelligent routing Zone-to-zone drive times are known up front, so a booking is judged on the drive it creates.
Where does an out-of-town job land?
Core booking Wherever it fits.
Intelligent routing Next to the other work in that area — batched, not a separate trip for one job.
How is a far-out area handled?
Core booking Core, on-request, or outside — you draw all three, and every tier gets them.
Intelligent routing Same map, now used for placement: a job in a far area is offered on a day a truck is already headed there, instead of on whichever day happened to be open.
When does the crew leave?
Core booking Your best guess.
Intelligent routing A leave-by time per stop, derived from the real zone-to-zone drive.
You've already done most of the setup
The service-area map you drew on day one — your core coverage and your on-request areas — is the same map routing runs on. Turning intelligence on doesn't mean re-describing your territory; the zones are subdivisions of the shape you already have, and you get there by dropping a pin per area and letting the boundaries fall halfway between them. Nothing you set up in basic gets thrown away.
Live today
You draw your service area as zones — drop a pin per area and the boundaries fall halfway between them, contiguous, no islands. Drive times are measured zone to zone and cached, so the schedule knows what a trip costs without pricing every individual address. Jobs are placed against those zones, the day view shows a leave-by time per stop, and an area you only serve on request is scoped as exactly that.
The practical result: a booking in a far zone gets offered on the day a truck is already going there.
Still ahead
Moving an already-booked job to open a better slot is built but conservative — off by default, and it only reshuffles what you allow it to. Fuller day-level optimisation, and suggestions that act rather than ask, are roadmap. We would rather tell you which parts are mechanisms and which are still opinions.