Schedule jobs by travel time

Home-visit routing is for any business that drives to the customer. If your AI-handled callers ask things like "can you come out to my place?", you need this on. Typical fits:

• Plumbers, electricians, HVAC, locksmiths, handymen
• Mobile cleaners, mobile mechanics, mobile car detailing
• Mobile vets and mobile groomers
• Personal trainers who visit client homes
• Any field technician or installer

If all your work happens in a shop or studio, skip this guide and use the basic multi-staff routing instead.

Two related but separate settings control home-visit behaviour:

• Service coverage — where you'll go. Suburbs list, radius from a base, state, or nationwide. See Service coverage. Callers outside coverage are politely declined.
• Travel time (routing) — how much time to pad between jobs, given you're going. This is what this guide covers.

In practice, set coverage first, then tune routing.

Open Settings → Smart Booking → Home-visit routing and set your home base — the suburb or address your drivers usually start from. This is used to estimate the first leg of each day's driving.

Two common patterns:

• Fixed depot — one office or warehouse everyone leaves from each morning. Set that address here.
• Per-provider home bases — each technician starts from their own house. Set the business home base as a fallback, and override it per provider in their profile.

Two padding strategies are supported:

• Per-job buffer (simple) — add a fixed number of minutes after every job for travel, regardless of destination. E.g. "30 min after every job". Works when your jobs are all in a small area.
• Per-suburb estimate (smart) — use our suburb-to-suburb travel matrix to estimate real drive times. Offered slots respect the actual distance between consecutive customers. Worth it for anyone covering more than ~30km.

Pick one or the other. Start with per-job (easy to set up), upgrade to per-suburb once you've seen the AI miss a few late arrivals.

When routing is on, the AI asks for the caller's suburb early in the booking flow — before checking availability. This lets it factor in travel time from the previous job to theirs.

Example turn:

• Caller: "I need a plumber at my place tomorrow morning."
• AI: "No worries. What suburb are you in so I can offer times that work with our schedule?"
• Caller: "Richmond."
• AI: "Great. I have tomorrow at 9am or 11am open in Richmond — which suits?"

If the caller's suburb isn't in your coverage list (or outside your radius), the AI politely declines and offers to take details for follow-up — useful in case you ever expand.

Example:

• AI: "We don't currently service Brunswick East, but I can take your details and have the team reach out if we add that area. Would that be OK?"

You can review rejected callers in the Leads dashboard filtered by Out of area — helpful for deciding where to expand next.

Every booking with routing enabled logs the routing decision — which depot, what travel-time estimate, and what the gap between jobs ended up being. Open any appointment in the dashboard and check the Routing section to see how the AI chose the slot.

If you see consistently tight gaps or wasted hours, tweak the per-job or per-suburb padding until it looks right. Changes apply to future bookings immediately.