Understanding routes in Mowzey
A route is just a set of jobs grouped by crew and day of the week. Get the mental model right and the rest of the schedule clicks into place.
If you've spent years scribbling addresses on a clipboard or color-coding cells in a spreadsheet, the way Mowzey thinks about routes will feel a little different. There is no separate "route" object you have to create and name. A route is simply every job a specific crew is doing on a specific day of the week. Once you understand that, the schedule builder, the optimize button, and the daily dispatch all start to make sense.
What is a route?
In Mowzey a route is the intersection of two things: a crew and a day of the week. If Mike's crew (L1) services 18 properties every Tuesday, that's a route. If Sara's crew (L2) services 14 properties every Thursday, that's a different route. Same customers on a different day or with a different crew is a different route.
Every route lives inside the Schedule Builder. Each customer property on a recurring subscription shows up as a stop, the stops are grouped by crew and day, and the whole thing is rendered on a Mapbox map so you can see geography at a glance.
Why routes matter
On paper, routing feels like an organizational chore. In practice it is the single biggest lever you have on profitability. Three things change when your routes are tight:
- Less drive time. A typical 4-6 person lawn care operation can cut 30-40% of its weekly drive time just by grouping customers geographically and letting Mapbox optimize the order.
- Fewer miles on the truck. Fuel, tires, and brake pads all scale with miles driven. Tight routes put real money back in your pocket every month.
- More jobs per day. Drive time you save is mow time you gain. The same crew on a better route finishes earlier or fits one or two more stops into the day.
Mowzey vs. paper-based scheduling
The clipboard works until it doesn't. When a customer cancels, you scratch them out. When you sell three new houses on the same street, you squeeze them into the margin. When a crew leader quits, the routes live in his head and the whole week falls apart.
Mowzey makes the route a live, shared object. The Schedule Builder shows every assigned and unassigned customer. Drag a stop from one crew to another and the map redraws. Click optimize and the order shuffles to the shortest path. Your crew opens the Schedule tab in the morning and sees the same plan you built the night before, in optimized order, with one-tap directions.
Pro tip
Customers, subscriptions, and routes
Three building blocks combine to make a route. They flow in one direction:
- Customer. A person and a property. Created on the Customers page, with an address Mapbox geocodes into a point on the map.
- Subscription. The recurring service agreement, set on the customer page. You pick the service (mow, edge, blow), the price, and the frequency (weekly, biweekly, monthly). The subscription is what causes recurring jobs to exist.
- Route assignment. Inside the Schedule Builder you drop that subscription onto a specific crew and day of the week. From that point on, every recurring job auto-spawns on the right crew's route on the right day.
Recurring jobs auto-generate eight weeks ahead of today, so you always have a couple of months of visibility into the road. One-time jobs (a quick cleanup, a leaf haul) live on a route too, but they only exist for the date you schedule them.
Route vs. schedule
These two words get used interchangeably in the lawn care world, but inside Mowzey they mean different things. The route is the plan. Who goes where, with which crew, on which day of the week. Built and edited in the Schedule Builder. The schedule is the execution. The actual jobs that exist on real calendar dates, status moving from scheduled to in-progress to complete. Viewed on the Schedule page.
You build the route once, then maintain it. You look at the schedule every day.