Creating your first route

Group nearby customers, assign a crew and a day, and let the optimizer figure out the drive order. Most crews shave 30 to 40 percent off their drive time.

A route in Mowzey is a bundle of jobs assigned to one crew on one day, ordered to minimize drive time. You build routes in the Schedule view by dragging customers onto a crew and a day, then clicking optimize. Mapbox runs the math and reorders the stops so your crew zig-zags less. This guide walks through building your first one.

Before you start

You'll need three things in place:

  • At least one crew. Add crews under Settings → Crews. A crew can be one person (you) or a team with a truck.
  • Customers with property addresses. The optimizer needs a real street address to plot. PO boxes and "behind the shed" notes won't work.
  • A general idea of how long each job takes. This lives on the service definition. The optimizer uses it to fit jobs into a workday without overbooking.

Opening the route builder

Click Schedule in the left sidebar, then pick the Routes tab. You'll see a calendar week across the top with one row per crew. Each cell is a day-crew bucket where jobs go.

The left panel shows your unscheduled jobs. The right side is the live week view of every route in progress. If nothing's there yet, that's normal. You're about to fill it.

Building a route

1
In the unscheduled jobs panel, find the customer or job you want to add. You can filter by neighborhood, ZIP, or service type using the chips at the top.
2
Drag the job onto the day and crew you want it on. The cell shows a running total of stops and estimated hours so you can see at a glance if you're overbooking.
3
Repeat for every job on that route. Don't worry about the order yet. Just get the right jobs into the right day-crew bucket.
4
Click Optimize on the route. Mapbox reorders the stops to minimize total drive distance, respecting any time windows you've set on the jobs. Optimization usually takes under 5 seconds.
5
Click Save route. The crew will see the ordered stop list in their mobile app, with one-tap directions to each address.

Pro tip

Start each route at your shop or yard. Set a start address on the crew (Settings → Crews) and the optimizer will treat that as stop 0. The first real customer of the day will be the closest one to your start.

What route optimization actually does

Mapbox's optimizer is solving a traveling-salesman problem across your stops. It considers actual road network drive times, not straight-line distance, so it knows that two houses on opposite sides of a highway are not next-door neighbors.

In typical lawn care routes (20 to 40 stops in a metro-suburban area), the optimizer beats human ordering by 30 to 40 percent on drive time. That translates directly into fuel saved, payroll saved, and one or two extra jobs squeezed into the day.

You can re-optimize anytime; for example, after a customer cancels last-minute. The crew's mobile app pushes the new order the moment you save.

Recurring routes

Most lawn routes repeat. Once you've built and optimized a route you like, click the menu on the route header and pick Repeat weekly (or biweekly / monthly). Mowzey will clone the route forward indefinitely.

Adding a new customer to an existing recurring route is easy: drag them onto next week's instance of the route and pick Apply to all future. They'll be on the route every cycle going forward.

Good to know

Recurring routes auto-create jobs 14 days ahead so you can see two weeks out at any time. Older completed routes stick around for billing and history but don't clutter your active schedule.