Route planning in field sales: a week in ten minutes

By Manuel Ober · 6 September 2026 · 6 min read

Why planning the week eats so much time

Most reps plan their week on a Sunday evening and spend an hour or two on it. By Tuesday the plan is wrong anyway, because a customer cancels or an appointment runs long.

The cause is usually the order you plan in. You enter one appointment, then the next, and only at the end do you notice that Monday has three customers in three different districts. So you rebuild, and rebuild again.

Turn the order around and ten minutes is enough. There are five steps.

Step 1: Who is actually due?

First work out which customers you are due to see this week. For that, each customer needs two details: the last visit and the gap you want before the next one.

An example: A customers every 30 days, B customers every 60, C customers every 120. From those two details you can see who is overdue, who is due in two weeks and who still has time.

That list is your week. Not the calendar, and not the spreadsheet with all 300 customers. It is the 15 to 25 names that are due now.

Rule of thumb: if you regularly have more than 25 customers due in a week, the gaps are too short or the territory is too big. No plan fixes that. It is a conversation with your manager.

Step 2: Group by area, not by importance

The most common mistake: the most important customers go on Monday, wherever they are. The result is 200 kilometres for four visits.

Look at the due customers on a map. Everything in the north is one day, everything in the south is another. An A customer on Thursday is no less important than one on Monday. They just come up on a different day.

If you have never seen your customer list on a map, expect a surprise. Two customers who sit one under the other in the list are 80 kilometres apart. Three others you never thought of together are on the same street.

Step 3: Set the order by drive times

Only now do you set the order within a day, and you do it by calculated drive times, not by feel. If you guess, it is easy to lose 40 minutes a day. Nobody types seven legs one by one into the sat nav on a Friday, so people guess.

Between two customers it is 18 minutes or 50, depending on the route. When you guess, you think of the best drive, not the typical one. That is how a day with six visits turns into a day with five.

Any sat nav shows you drive times, but only for the next leg. A planner that works out all the legs of the day at once saves you the most here. More in the guide Drive times in field sales.

Step 4: Build in opening hours and a buffer

Put your customers' opening hours into the plan instead of keeping them in your head. A pharmacy that closes from 12:30 to 14:00 turns a good plan into a bad one if you are at the door at 12:45. The same goes for practices that are shut one or two afternoons a week and businesses with an early shift.

Then add a buffer: one visit per day that can drop out without the others wobbling. Five visits with room to spare beat seven without. The seventh falls through anyway, and the sixth goes with it.

Fixed appointments tie you to one place at one time and decide where the rest of the day happens. Keep them few, and know which due customer is nearby in case one falls through.

What a day that works looks like:

• The first visit is a customer who opens early, usually from 8 o'clock.
• The long drives come in the morning.
• Lunch is where there is a break anyway: near the pharmacy with the lunchtime closure.
• The last visit is placed so that the drive home does not hit the evening rush.

Step 5: The plan has to be everywhere

You need the plan in the car on Monday morning, on the computer in the office and on your phone again at the customer's. A plan that lives only in a notebook is only valid there.

If you work with Excel, you know the problem: the file is on the laptop, the phone has an old version and the visit note is on a slip of paper. When the plan syncs between devices on its own, the retyping goes, and the mistakes with it.

What happens when a customer cancels?

That is the test for any plan: if the third customer cancels on Tuesday, the rest of the day still has to work. If you know a due customer near every fixed appointment, you drive there instead of going home.

With a handwritten list that means working it all out again. With the buffer from step 4 the cancellation barely shows. The customer who cancelled stays on your due list until you have actually visited them.

The ten-minute checklist

1. Filter out the customers who are due. Do not look at the whole list.
2. Group by area on the map, one district per day.
3. Set the order by calculated drive times, for all the legs of the day.
4. Check opening hours and leave one buffer visit per day.
5. Get the plan onto all your devices, then drive.

How trakki does it

trakki takes most of these steps off your hands. You upload your customer list as an Excel file (.xlsx). The map shows who is overdue, due soon or still fine. At the tap of a button trakki lays out the week by due date, calculates with road drive times and plans only within opening hours, lunchtime closures included. trakki does not know about rush-hour traffic. You leave the buffer yourself, for example with a lower daily target.

If a customer cancels, they stay due. Drag a visit to another day and you see the detour straight away. When a slot frees up, trakki suggests customers nearby. Your customer list is on your phone, and there is no trakki server for it. Between devices you sync through your own cloud: Google Drive or OneDrive. The file there is encrypted with your sync password.

trakki is coming for iPhone and Android and starts in Austria. More on the home page and in the guide Get your Excel customer list onto a map.

Frequently asked questions

How many customers a day is realistic?

It depends on the territory. In a city, eight short visits are doable. In the country, with 40 kilometres between customers, four or five is more likely. What matters more than the number is whether the drive times are right. Five visits on time are worth more than seven planned and five managed.

Should I plan the week on Friday or on Sunday?

On Friday. You still know what was left over this week, and the weekend is yours. If you get planning down to ten minutes, you can also do it at seven on Monday morning, before the first drive.

What if my territory is too big for day trips?

Then you need trips with an overnight stay. When they pay off is in the guide Overnight or drive home?.