PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Routes & Dispatch

Measuring a Porta Potty Route: Stops per Day, Miles and Dollars per Truck

You cannot improve a route you do not measure. Most portable toilet owners have a feel for which routes are good and which are not, but a feel is easy to fool. A route that keeps a driver busy all day can still lose money. The previous article, Units and Placement Notes on Every Stop: What Dispatch Hands the Driver, covered the details on each stop. This one covers the numbers that add up across all of them.

Stops per Day

The simplest number is stops per day per truck. The dispatch board shows the stops on each truck's day, so you can see it before the truck leaves. Over a few weeks, you will see what a normal day looks like for each route.

Stops alone can mislead, though. A stop with one Standard unit and a stop with twelve units and two hand wash stations are both one stop. Use stops as a starting point, then look at the units behind them.

Dollars per Day

The board also totals the dollars per service for the day. That is often more useful than the stop count. A city route with thirty small residential stops might be worth less than a construction route with fifteen big sites. When you compare routes, compare what they are worth, not just how busy they look.

Track dollars per day per truck over time. A route whose value slides month after month is losing customers or slipping on price, and you want to know before it shows up in your bank account.

Miles

Route miles cost fuel, tires and truck wear. The simplest way to track them is the odometer: have drivers record the reading at the start and end of the day, or pull it from your fuel records. You do not need a perfect number; a weekly figure per truck is enough to see trends.

Compare miles to stops. A rural route will always have more miles per stop than a city route, and that is fine as long as the dollars justify it. What you are looking for is a route whose miles creep up without more stops or more dollars, which usually means the route order or the area split has drifted. Splitting Porta Potty Work Across Trucks Without Crossing Paths covers fixing area splits.

Hours and Stops per Hour

The time clock in PortaPottyBossPro records when drivers clock in and out, so you have real hours for each day. Divide stops by hours for stops per hour, and dollars by hours for dollars per hour. Those two numbers tell you how efficient a route really is.

City routes often have high stops per mile but low stops per hour, because of traffic and parking. Rural routes are the reverse. Comparing each route to its own history is more useful than comparing a city route to a rural one.

Dollars per Mile

One more number is worth a look on spread-out routes: dollars per mile. Take the week's dollar total for a truck from the board and divide it by the week's miles. A route that earns well per hour but poorly per mile is usually long drives between well-paid stops, which is a pricing question. A route that earns poorly on both is usually a route-design question. That split tells you whether to call customers about price or open the map and redraw borders.

It also helps when quoting new work. If a prospect sits far outside your current routes, the dollars-per-mile figure for your nearest route gives you a real basis for a trip charge instead of a guess.

A Simple Weekly Review

You do not need a spreadsheet full of formulas. Once a week, write down for each truck:

• Stops for the week
• Dollars for the week
• Miles for the week
• Hours for the week

Keep it in the same place every week, whether that is a notebook or a simple sheet. After a month, you will know each route's normal range. When a week falls outside it, look at why: a weather week, a new driver, a big delivery day, or a route that is starting to break.

Watch the Overdue Count Too

Efficiency is not the whole story. A route can look great on stops per hour because it is quietly leaving stops behind. Look at the Waiting List for overdue pins in each route's area. A route that is fast but always leaves overdue stops is not fast; it is short. Due, Overdue, Not Yet: Reading Pin Colors on a Porta Potty Route Map explains how overdue status works.

What the Numbers Are For

The point of measuring is decisions: whether to raise prices on a far-out area, whether to move a border between two trucks, whether to change the route order, and whether it is time for another truck. That last decision gets its own article, When to Add a Porta Potty Route (and a Truck) Instead of Stretching the Ones You Have.

For how measurement fits with planning, dispatch and the driver's day, see PortaPottyBossPro portable toilet route software.