TrashCanBossPro Blog — Trash Can Cleaning Software

Routing in Trash Can Cleaning Software: Building the Day Around Trash Day

A bin cleaning route is a lot of short stops. Twenty, forty, sometimes more in a day. The difference between a good route and a bad one is an hour of driving, a trailer that finishes before dark, and cans that get cleaned while they are still empty.

From Due to Routed

In The Waiting List: How Bin Cleanings Come Due on Their Own, we saw how due cleanings collect on a live map. Routing is the next step: taking those due pins and turning them into a day's work for each trailer, in an order that makes sense to drive.

This is an overview. The point is to show how routing fits into the whole system, not every setting.

The Dispatch Board

In TrashCanBossPro, routing happens on the Scheduled List, the dispatch board. It shows jobs by day. Each job carries its address and can line, so the office can see what each stop involves at a glance.

Jobs move from the Waiting List to the board when the office assigns them to a day and a trailer or truck. Once they are on the board, they are on the tech's phone for that day.

Start With Trash Day

The first routing decision in bin cleaning is not about distance. It is about trash day. Cans are only worth cleaning once the city has emptied them, so the best day to clean an address is its trash day, after pickup, or the day after.

Because the trash day is stored on every address, the office can group due cleanings by it. Addresses on the same trash day tend to sit in the same neighborhoods, so that grouping also keeps the route tight. Tuesday trash day streets go out Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday morning, Thursday streets on Thursday or Friday, and so on through the week.

Filter by Trailer

With more than one trailer or truck, filter the board to see one at a time. Each trailer gets its own route for the day. That makes it easy to split a big trash day between two trailers, or to send one trailer to residential streets while another handles HOA dumpster pads.

Auto-Route From the Shop

Once a trailer has its stops for the day, auto-routing puts them in order from the shop:

• Closest First. Start near the shop and work outward.
• Furthest First. Drive out to the far end first and work back toward the shop.

Furthest First is handy when you want the trailer heading home as the day ends. Closest First works when you want the nearest customers done early. Either way, you can then drag stops into your own order when you know something the map doesn't, like a gate that only opens after 10am or a customer who asked to be first.

The Same Order on the Phone

Whatever order the board shows is the order the tech sees in the tech app. The tech does not have to figure out the route. They open the app, see the first stop, tap the navigation button and go. If the office moves a job, the tech's list follows.

The order also drives what the customer sees. The customer app shows today's route on a live map with their place in line, like "You're stop 12 of 20, the crew is 5 stops away," and alerts go out when they're next. For the crew side of this, read The Tech App in Trash Can Cleaning Software: What the Crew Sees in the Field.

Watching the Route During the Day

Routes don't always go to plan. Crew GPS from the techs' phones shows on the office map, so the office knows where each trailer is. As techs tap Start, Skip and Complete, the board updates. A skipped stop shows up right away, and the office can call the customer or move the job to another day.

A Weekly Routing Rhythm

Many bin cleaning companies settle into a simple weekly rhythm: each trash day's streets get cleaned the same afternoon or the next morning, every week. Monthly customers on a given street come due at different times, but they always come due near the same day of the week, because their trash day doesn't move. That makes the week predictable for the crew and the customers.

The Takeaway

Routing in bin cleaning starts with trash day, then trailer, then order. The dispatch board, trailer filter and auto-routing handle the mechanics, and the tech's phone follows. For how routing connects to plans, the apps and billing, visit the trash can cleaning software page.