A multi-drop run assembled across a CRM, a pin-map, a consumer mapping tool and a calendar takes most of a morning, and any change means doing it again. This adds up the planning, the publishing, the replans and the chasing across the year, and puts the mileage saving from an honest stop order beside it.
Nobody times the morning it takes to plan a run, because it is four different tools and none of them feels like the job. Read the CRM, paste addresses into a map, guess an order in another one, type it all into a calendar, hunt the invoices. Then someone rings to change a drop and it happens again. This adds it up across the year, at the planner's wage, and puts the miles beside it.
Four blocks of time, each timed per run or per week and multiplied out. Planning is reading the orders out of the CRM, getting them onto a map and choosing an order. Publishing is typing the schedule into the calendar one drop at a time and attaching the invoices. Chasing is the ad-hoc hunt for a phone number, a delivery note or a PDF that should have been on the entry. Replans are the ones that hurt: a customer changes a day, a pallet is not ready, and the whole thing is assembled again because there is nothing to edit.
The hours are costed at the planner's rate. The second line is the miles: a stop order chosen by eye in a consumer mapping tool, with no drive times, no offload windows and no break rules, is driveable but not efficient. Honest drive-time maths typically trims 5–10% of miles, and on a fleet's weekly mileage that is fuel, hours and wear recovered every week.
Because it is the one that makes people avoid change. When republishing a run means retyping every calendar entry, a plan gets frozen the moment it is sent, and the business bends around it — the late pallet goes on the wrong day, the driver gets a phone call instead of an updated calendar, the customer waits. In the platform built for this fleet, re-sending after a change updates the same calendar events in place and recalling deletes them, so a replan is seconds and a plan is allowed to be wrong until it is right.
Three runs a week for 48 weeks. Ninety minutes to plan each, 45 to publish, 20 to chase, and two replans a week at an hour: 216 + 108 + 48 + 96 = 468 hours a year, or about 195 minutes per run, which is most of a morning. At £18 an hour, £8,424. Six hundred miles a week with 7% trimmed at 45p a mile is 2,016 miles and £907. About £9,300 a year — before the errors a retyped postcode causes, and before the compliance that currently lives in the driver's head.
Time a fortnight of runs honestly rather than estimating, and count the replans — they are always more than remembered. If a run passes through four tools and a person is the integration between them, that chain can be collapsed into one piece of software shaped around the working day, in days rather than months; the operations audit maps every retyping step between your tools and costs what could be collapsed. The other calculators cover quoting, buying and the hire, and the short version of the method is on the byHoratio homepage.
Minutes, if the orders arrive on a map on their own and an engine sequences them with real drive times, offload windows and driver-hours rules. In the fleet this tool loads with, a run that took 60–120 minutes across four tools is proposed and adjusted in 5–10 minutes, and publishing it to the drivers' calendar — customer, phone, notes, driver and invoice link on every stop — is one click.
For a stop order previously chosen by eye, honest drive-time maths typically trims 5–10 per cent of miles. It is rarely more than that for a competent human planner, which is why the tool defaults to 7 and lets you set your own. The larger savings in a rebuild are the hours and the errors, not the fuel.
For the routing itself, often yes. The cost in this calculator comes from everything either side of it: retyping orders out of the CRM, typing the schedule into a calendar, hunting invoices, and replanning from scratch. Per-vehicle routing SaaS has no trigger from your CRM, no invoice pipeline and no calendar your drivers already read, so that copy-and-paste survives alongside the subscription.
It should, and it is one of the strongest arguments for building rather than buying. The scheduler in case study 001 applies real road drive times, per-stop offload windows, HGV driver-hours limits, the mandatory break for the firm's 7.2-tonne vehicle, multi-day splitting with overnight positioning, and bridge-height-aware routing per vehicle — and refuses to crew a lorry with a van-only driver.
Because they are the hidden cost. A plan that cannot be edited gets frozen the moment it is published, and the business bends around it. Counting replans separately shows how much of the year goes on doing the same work twice — and it is the line that disappears completely when a change edits the calendar in place.
If it is four, and a person is the integration between them, that is a morning a week you are paying for twice. Twenty minutes, no deck, no pitch.
HORATIO@BYHORATIO.COM
The platform this tool loads with — four tools collapsed into one, 2 hours to 10 minutes.
The same arithmetic for a slow quoting method.
The hire, the charge-out rate, the margin leak, and more.