The Job Planner is where a day of work becomes a plan. It is a full-screen, drag-to-assign board under Transport that puts every job and your whole fleet on one shared 24-hour timeline. We call it the Job Planner, not a transport planner, on purpose: it plans any kind of job, a collection, a multi-drop delivery, a removal, or a warehouse run, so a mixed operation works from a single view rather than juggling spreadsheets.
How the board is laid out
The planner has two pieces. The top pane is your demand: the jobs that need to go out, sitting in a pool until you place them. The bottom pane is your supply: lanes for each vehicle or driver across the day. You drag work from the top onto a lane below, and the board immediately shows you whether that placement is sensible. You can drag the divider between the two panes to give either one more room.
Plan by vehicle or by driver
A single toggle switches the bottom pane between vehicle lanes and driver lanes. Planners who think in trucks can lay out the day by vehicle; planners who think in people can lay it out by driver. The board remembers which view you prefer, so it opens the way you work. When a job needs more than one person, it appears on each crew member’s lane in driver view, so nobody is double-booked by accident.
Assigning jobs is a drag
To allocate a job, drag it from the demand pane onto a vehicle or driver lane. To reschedule, drag the job left or right to change its time and up or down to move it to another vehicle or driver, all in one gesture. There is no separate dialog to open and no form to re-key. The plan you build on screen is the plan that dispatches.
Filter the day down to what matters
A busy day has too many jobs to hold in your head. The Filters panel narrows the board by customer, job type, priority and destination postcode, as well as by vehicle type or driver. Postcode filtering is especially useful for building geographically sensible runs: pull up everything heading to one area and place it together. View controls let you hide empty lanes and show only vehicles that still have capacity, so the board stays focused as the day fills up.
Capacity, drive time and duty hours
The planner does the arithmetic you would otherwise do in your head, and flags the problems before they leave the yard:
- Capacity: each vehicle lane shows a capacity meter for pallet positions, weight and volume, so you can see at a glance when a vehicle is full. The planner checks capacity as you place work and stops you overloading a vehicle.
- Drive time and mileage: the day summary totals the planned drive time and mileage for the plan, and the board estimates drive time between stops.
- Running late: any stop that cannot be reached in time shows a red projected-arrival time and stands out on the board, so an impossible schedule is obvious rather than discovered on the road.
- Driver hours: driver lanes show the planned duty hours for the day against the driver’s contracted hours, and turn red when the day runs over.
Crew and compliance warnings
Some jobs need two people, and some drivers are not legal for the work you are about to give them. The planner watches both.
A job can carry a required crew size, taken from the job itself or from a job-type default. On the board, a job block shows assigned against required crew, for example “1/2”, and turns amber when it is short. An “under-crewed” counter in the header tells you how many jobs that day still need more people, so nothing goes out short-handed by mistake.
When you allocate a job to a driver, the planner checks that driver’s qualifications and warns if their licence, CPC or medical has expired, or if a hazardous job needs ADR the driver does not hold. The warning is a soft flag, not a hard block, so you stay in control, but you are never assigning a non-compliant driver without knowing. These checks read the expiry dates you keep in fleet and driver management.
Route suggestions, the map and auto-refresh
Once a lane has several stops, a suggest-order action proposes a sensible visit sequence so you are not hand-sorting drops. The linked map draws a coloured route line for each vehicle or driver, and selecting a job highlights it on the map, so the geography of the plan is visible, not just the timeline. Turn on auto-refresh and the board keeps itself current as jobs progress, so a planner watching a live day sees changes without reloading.
A typical planning session
- Open the planner and pick a day. Open the Job Planner under Transport and choose the day you are planning. The whole day and your fleet sit on one shared 24-hour timeline, with unallocated jobs in the demand pane and your vehicles or drivers as lanes below.
- Choose vehicle lanes or driver lanes. Toggle the bottom pane between vehicle lanes and driver lanes depending on how you plan. Your choice is remembered between sessions.
- Filter the day down. Use the Filters panel to narrow the day by customer, job type, priority and destination postcode, plus vehicle type or driver, so you only see the work you are placing.
- Drag jobs onto a vehicle or driver. Drag an unallocated job onto a lane to assign it. Drag it left or right to change its time and up or down to move it to another vehicle or driver, in one action.
- Check capacity, hours and warnings. Watch the capacity meter, the planned duty hours against the driver's contracted hours, and the licence, crew and running-late warnings as you place each job, and adjust before the run goes out.
- Suggest a sensible visit order. Use the suggest-order action on a lane to propose a route sequence for the stops, then turn on auto-refresh so the board keeps pace as jobs progress through the day.
From plan to the road
Allocating a job in the planner is the same act as assigning it for dispatch. Once a job is assigned and dispatched it appears on the driver’s phone, where they work it stop by stop and capture proof of delivery. See Transport jobs and proof of delivery for the dispatch and POD side, and The Loaditude Driver app for what the driver sees.
Where to go next
- Fleet and driver management covers the vehicles, capacities and driver records the planner reads.
- Transport jobs and proof of delivery covers creating jobs and capturing proof on the road.