Free route planner for outside sales reps
No account No cost No sales call Sequence a day of client visits across your territory — no cargo, just appointment windows and drive time.
Nothing to sign up for. Open the tool, download the sample workbook, replace the sample stops with yours, and run it.
Open the route optimizer Download the sample workbookWho this is for
Outside sales reps
Plan a multi-account day so drive time between client sites is minimized, not just visited in the order they were added.
Merchandisers
Sequence store visits across a territory within each store's preferred visit window.
Territory managers
Cap how many accounts one rep can realistically see in a day, given real drive times.
Pharma & medical sales reps
Respect a clinic or office's limited visiting hours.
What it actually does
This is a vehicle routing problem (VRP) solver — the same class of model commercial routing software runs, using Google OR-Tools and real road drive times from OSRM, not straight-line distances.
| Constraint | What it means for a rep's visit day |
|---|---|
| Time windows | A client only takes meetings between 9 and 11am; a store's manager is only in on certain days. |
| Vehicle capacity | Used here as a visit cap — the maximum number of accounts one rep can see in a day, not cargo. |
| Route time limit | Cap a rep's total day, including drive time between accounts. |
| Unserved stops | An account that does not fit into any rep's day within its window is flagged, so you know to move it to another day. |
| Mixed fleet | If more than one rep covers overlapping territory, each can have their own visit cap and day length. |
You get back an Excel file with each rep's stop sequence and arrival times, plus an interactive map of the routes.
What it does not do
Being straight about the limits, so nobody wastes an afternoon:
- It is not live dispatch. It plans a day up front. It does not re-route mid-shift when a request comes in.
- There is no driver app. You hand out the route sheet or paste stops into a phone map yourself.
- No live traffic. Drive times are typical road times, not current conditions.
- Single trip, single depot. It plans one load per vehicle from one starting point — it does not model a vehicle returning to reload mid-route.
- It runs to a time limit, so on very large problems it returns the best route set it found in that window, not a proven optimum.
Your data
The workbook you upload is read in memory and is not saved to the server.
But be aware of what does leave: to get real drive times, the coordinates of your stops are sent to the public OSRM routing service, and the resulting travel-time matrix is cached on the server under a hash of those coordinates. If you paste street addresses instead of coordinates, those addresses are sent to the US Census geocoder and/or OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service.
How to start
1. Get the template
Download the sample workbook. It has four sheets: locations, vehicles, parameters, solution.
2. Put your day in it
The first data row of locations is your office or the rep's starting point. Every row after it is a client visit — set demand1 to 1 per stop (each visit takes one "slot"), and enter the visit window.
3. Upload and run
Drop the file on the optimizer and hit run. Results come back as a map plus a workbook you can print or share.
If your Excel columns are named differently: on the locations sheet, rename them to match the sample — those are read by name. On the vehicles sheet, columns are read by position, so keep them in the sample’s exact order.
Why it is free
I am an operations research analyst. I spent twenty years building optimization models inside Excel for manufacturers and airlines, where they stayed locked in spreadsheets nobody else could open. I have been converting them into free web tools one at a time and writing up how each conversion went.
There is no cargo in this use case, so most of the routing software built for delivery fleets is overkill and priced for it anyway. This is the same solver, used for visit sequencing instead of package delivery, free.
Questions, or an input format that does not fit? Email mario@kindoflost.com. I read them.
Other routing use cases
Same solver and engine, different worked example — each of these is written for its own setting. Start from whichever is closest to yours.
- Food banks & food rescue — Home-delivery and donor-pickup routing for volunteer drivers.
- Excel Solver alternative — For when Excel Solver or SolverStudio can’t handle the problem size anymore.
- Spreadsheet-in, spreadsheet-out — Upload an Excel file of stops, get back a routed workbook and a map.
- Open-source vehicle routing — What’s actually free — the Google OR-Tools engine behind this and most routing tools.
- Last-mile delivery routing — Parcel and package delivery, per-van capacity and time windows.
- Field service routing — Technician appointment windows, job duration, and per-tech capacity.
- Delivery route planner — For small businesses running their own delivery routes.
- Fleet route optimization — Multi-vehicle trucking and distribution fleets.
- Courier routing software — Same-day and multi-stop courier services.
- Waste & recycling collection routing — Truck capacity and collection time windows.
Related
- Route optimizer — the tool itself, with the full parameter reference.
- Optimizador de rutas — Spanish version.
- Kind-of-Lost — write-ups of each model, including how this one was built.