A badly ordered round costs you money every day. Not in any obvious way — the work still gets done, the customers still get cleaned — but in dead time between stops. A round that runs east to west, then backtracks north, then cuts across the middle again can add 45 minutes of windscreen time to a day that already starts at 7am.
Here’s how to think about round planning properly.
Start with geography, not alphabetical order
The most common mistake is scheduling clients in the order they signed up, or by surname. Neither has anything to do with where they live. Before you do anything else, plot all your clients on a map and look at where they actually cluster.
Most rounds have natural zones: a pocket of streets in one area, another cluster on the other side of town. Build your day around those zones. Do everything in zone one, then move to zone two. The distance between zones is unavoidable. The distance within a zone should be minimal.
Optimise for the last stop, not the first
Most people optimise from the top down: start at the nearest client, then go to the next nearest from there. That works for the first few stops, but it often leaves you at the wrong end of town at 3pm when you have three more cleans in the opposite direction.
A better approach: look at where your last client of the day is, and work backwards. If you end up finishing close to home, the day is efficient. If the last stop is 40 minutes from your depot, you’ve got a routing problem at the end rather than the beginning.
Account for job time, not just travel time
Window cleaning jobs aren’t all the same length. A conservatory with six windows takes a different amount of time than a terrace with four. If you’re estimating your day based on travel time alone and ignoring job duration, you’ll either run behind schedule or finish early with nothing to fill it.
Get rough times for each stop and factor them into your day view. Knowing that stop three takes 45 minutes and stop four takes 20 means you can pack them sensibly rather than leaving gaps.
The weather question
UK window cleaning is weather-dependent in a way that other trades aren’t. Rain the night before isn’t necessarily a problem — clean windows after rain is a legitimate selling point for some customers. Heavy rain while you’re cleaning is another matter.
The practical move is to check the forecast the evening before and think about which clients you’d reschedule if the weather turns. Having a mental priority list — the regular Monday residential clients you’d defer, versus the monthly commercial contract you’d push through regardless — saves a scramble on the day.
Use software to do the maths
Doing this by eye works when you have 20 clients. At 60+, the combinations are too many to optimise manually. Window cleaning scheduling software like Servogo puts all your stops on a map and optimises the order with one click. Drag any stop if you want to override it (a client who’s only home in the afternoon, for instance), and arrival times update live.
The other advantage of doing it in software: when a client reschedules at 8am, you’re not reworking the whole day on a piece of paper. Move the stop, hit optimise again, and you’ve got a revised route in seconds.
The simple version
If you want to start somewhere today without any software:
- Group your clients by area on a map.
- Plan your day to do each area in one pass.
- Start with the area farthest from home and work back, so you finish close to where you started.
- Build in a break mid-morning and one in the afternoon. Skipping breaks doesn’t save time if you’re slower on the second half of the day.
That’s not optimal, but it’ll be better than going east-west-north-south in whatever order they’re in your phone.