Your crew doesn't lose the day at the job site. They lose it in 12-minute pieces between them.
Nobody bills for windshield time, but everybody pays for it.
When I was running crews, I tracked everything at the job — hours, materials, callbacks. What I never tracked was the space between jobs. Wrong stop order, doubling back across town, two trucks crossing paths to opposite sides of the county. None of it shows up as a line item. All of it shows up on payroll.
The brutal math: 4 trucks × 45 wasted minutes a day is 15 paid hours a week — a part-time employee who produces nothing. And most small outfits are planning their stop order the way I did: in their head, in the driveway, at 6:45am.
That's the problem I ended up building for. CrewMap Pro is the route + field service piece of the 6-app BubbaCode ecosystem I'm building for the industries big software ignores — it puts the stops in the right order and shows you where every truck actually is, so the day's plan survives contact with reality.
Curious how other operators here handle it — do you plan stop order by gut, first-come-first-served, or actual software? And has anyone ever measured what the drive-between time really costs them?
Update on this one: the responses keep circling the same thing — nobody disputes the math, they dispute who's responsible for it. Drivers say the office builds bad routes, the office says drivers freelance the order anyway. That tension might be the actual product insight: the stop order isn't a route problem, it's an authority problem. Whoever owns the map owns the argument.