How to plan a multi-drop delivery route (without wasting an hour a day)

If you deliver to ten, twenty or forty places a day, the order you visit them in matters more than almost anything else you can change. A well-ordered run finishes earlier, uses less fuel and gets the time-critical drops there on time. A badly ordered one has you crossing the same roundabout three times and apologising to a café that opened twenty minutes ago without its bread.

This guide covers how to plan a multi-drop route by hand and with tools, what usually goes wrong, and the habits that keep a daily run tidy. It is written for small businesses with one to five vans, not courier depots.

What a "good" route actually means

The shortest route on a map is not always the best one. For a small delivery round, a good route usually balances four things:

• Total driving time, not distance. Five miles of dual carriageway can be quicker than two miles through a town centre at 8am.
• Time windows. A café that opens at 7:30 needs its delivery before then. An office with a goods-in door that opens at 9 can't be first.
• Unloading order. Whatever you load last comes off first. Your route and your loading plan are the same decision.
• Getting back. Most rounds end at the depot, the bakery or home. A route that finishes 25 minutes from base has a hidden 25 minutes in it.

Step 1: Start with a clean list of drops

Every route starts as a list. Before you think about order, make sure each drop has:

• A full address with a correct postcode. A wrong postcode is the most common reason a route tool puts a stop in a silly place.
• Access notes the driver needs: "back door down the alley", "key safe 1234", "leave with the butcher next door if closed".
• Any time window, written as "before 7:30" or "after 10:00", not "early-ish".
• What's being delivered, so you can check the van has it.

If your drops change every day because of standing orders and one-off changes, this is where most of the work is. Our guide to managing standing orders covers how to keep that list right.

Step 2: Group drops into areas

Before you order individual stops, look at the map and group drops into clusters: a town centre, an industrial estate, a string of villages along one road. Then decide the order of the clusters. This is the step that saves the most time, and it's the one people skip when they jump straight into a sat nav.

A useful rule: do the furthest cluster first or last, never in the middle. If your furthest cluster is in the middle of your day, you are driving out and back across your own route.

If you run more than one van, clusters are also how you split work between them. Two vans each doing a tight area beats two vans both criss-crossing the whole patch.

Step 3: Put stops in order within each area

Within a cluster, the aim is to never double back. Two simple methods work well by hand:

1. The sweep. Imagine a clock hand sweeping around your depot. Visit stops in the order the hand passes them. It's crude, but it avoids most zig-zags.
2. Nearest next, then fix. Go to the nearest unvisited stop each time, then look for any place where the route crosses itself. A route that crosses itself can almost always be shortened by reversing the bit between the crossing points.

Route tools do a more thorough version of the same thing. Our free multi-drop route planner uses real road travel times, puts the stops in a good order and gives you a Take me there button for each stop that opens Google Maps directions. It's free with no account.

Step 4: Fit in time windows

Time windows break the neat geographic order, and that's fine. Handle them like this:

• Put hard "before" windows first, even if it means a slightly longer run. Being late to the café that opens at 7:30 costs you more than five extra minutes of driving.
• Push "after" windows (goods-in from 9, offices that aren't staffed early) towards the end.
• Ask whether the window is real. Many customers say "early" because nobody has asked them. If they have a key safe or a secure spot, the window may not matter.

Every time window you can remove makes every other drop easier to plan.

The Google Maps stop limit

Google Maps is what most small operators use, and it works well for navigating each leg. For planning a whole route it has limits. Google's own help page says you can add up to nine stops, which includes the final destination, for driving directions (Google Maps Help). With your starting point, that's ten places in one set of directions.

It also doesn't reorder stops for you. It follows them in the order you type them. So for a 25-drop run you have to work out the order yourself and then split it into chunks of nine or fewer. That's exactly what a route planner is for: work out the order once, then open each leg in Google Maps to navigate.

Step 5: Don't forget the return to base

When you compare routes, always include the drive home. Two routes can look the same length until you add the last leg back. If your last drop is always on the far side of your patch, try reversing the whole route: the same stops backwards sometimes finish much closer to home.

The return leg also matters for collections. A laundry round or a bottle round brings things back, so the van needs space at the end of the run, not just the start (see our laundry rounds guide).

Step 6: Load to match the route

Once the order is fixed, load in reverse: last drop goes in first, at the back. For mixed loads, a simple per-customer list in drop order makes packing quick and stops the driver rummaging at every stop. If you produce or pick to order, you also want a total of each product for the day. That's your load list.

Common mistakes

Mistake	What it costs	Fix
Driving the same order every day even when drops change	Detours to areas with no drop that day	Re-plan whenever the drop list changes
Wrong or missing postcodes	Stops placed miles away, driver confusion	Check postcodes when a customer is added
Treating every "early please" as a hard window	Longer routes for no real reason	Ask which windows are real
Ignoring the drive back	A hidden 20–30 minutes a day	Compare routes including the return leg
Only the owner knows the route	Nobody can cover sickness or holidays	Write it down with access notes

How much time does good routing save?

It depends on how scattered your drops are and how good your current order is, so be wary of anyone quoting a percentage. The honest way to find out is to time it. Take one typical day, note your current order and total time back at base, then plan the same drops properly and compare. If you save twenty minutes a day on a five-day round, that's over 80 hours a year. Our delivery cost calculator will turn your time and mileage into a cost per drop so you can see what that's worth.

When to move beyond pen, paper and Google Maps

Planning by hand is fine when the same stops happen every day. It gets painful when the list changes daily: standing orders, skips, one-off extras and new customers. At that point the route is only as good as the drop list, and the drop list is usually the problem. RoundSorted joins the two: it works out who's due each day from standing orders and changes, then puts that day's drops in driving order with Google Maps links for the driver. You can try the free route planner first with no account.