Routes & Scheduling
Routes are how you organize your work geographically. Instead of assigning individual jobs to individual technicians, you define routes (territories that cover a part of your service area) and assign technicians to those routes. Loma then takes care of building the daily schedule: ordering stops efficiently, assigning time windows, and putting the right jobs in front of the right people.
The Routes & Scheduling section of Loma has three tabs: Calendar, Map, and Configuration. Configuration is where you set up and manage your routes. Calendar and Map are where you see the results: your daily, weekly, and monthly schedule laid out by time or by geography.
You already have a working route. Loma creates a default route when your company is set up, and all new customer locations are assigned to it automatically. You can start scheduling jobs today without drawing territories or creating additional routes. When you’re ready to organize your service area, head to Configuration to add more routes.
Setting up a route
To create a route, go to Routes & Scheduling, click the Configuration tab, and then click ”+ Create Route.” The creation form walks you through three steps: Route Details, Territory, and Technicians.
Route Details
Give the route a name that’s meaningful to your team, like “Arlington & Mid Cities” or “North Dallas.” Route Name is the only required field.
You can also add an optional Route Code (a short identifier), a Description, and three operational settings:
| Setting | Default | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Max Daily Hours | 8 | Prevents the optimizer from packing too much work into one day |
| Max Stops Per Day | 20 | Caps the number of jobs on a single route per day |
| Preferred Start Time | 8:00 AM | Tells the optimizer when to begin scheduling the first stop |
Territory
This is where you define the geographic area the route covers. Using drawing tools on the map, you create a polygon boundary around the part of your service area that belongs to this route. You can draw freeform polygons or rectangles, edit points after drawing, and clear the boundary to start over. There’s also a Territory Description field for a plain-text summary of the area (e.g., “Arlington, Midlothian, Mid-Cities”).
Defining a territory is important because it’s how Loma knows which route a customer location belongs to. When a customer location falls within a route’s boundary, jobs at that location are automatically assigned to that route. If a location doesn’t fall within any route’s territory, its jobs will appear as “unrouted” in the Needs Attention section until you assign them manually.
Technicians
Assign one or more technicians to the route on a per-day basis. Each day of the week has its own assignment, so you can have Derek cover the route Monday through Friday and leave Saturday and Sunday unassigned if you don’t work weekends.
The Quick Assignment option at the top lets you assign a technician to all days at once and then adjust from there. An Assignment Summary at the bottom confirms who’s working which days.
A route without a technician assigned for a given day will show up as an unassigned route in the Needs Attention section. Jobs on that route won’t appear on anyone’s Field view until someone is assigned.
The default route
When your company is first created, Loma automatically creates a default route. All new customer locations are assigned to this route until you create additional routes and define their territories. You can rename the default route, change its settings, and draw a territory for it at any time. Most businesses will want to create additional routes fairly early on to split their service area into manageable territories.
Temporary routes
Sometimes you need to get a job done today and your regular routes are already full. A temporary route lets you handle that without reworking a schedule you’ve already set up.
When you’re editing a job’s schedule, the Route dropdown shows all your active routes along with who’s assigned and how many stops are already on each one for that day. At the bottom of that list, you’ll find ”+ Create Temporary Route.” Select it, give the route a name, assign a technician (maybe yourself), and set the time. The temporary route works like any other route for that day: once it exists, you can add more jobs to it, and it shows up on the Calendar and Map views. The difference is that a temporary route only lasts for a single day. It won’t carry over to tomorrow or appear in your route configuration.
This is useful when a customer calls with an urgent request, all your technicians are booked, and you or an office staff member need to handle it personally. Instead of reworking an existing route, you spin up a temporary one, get the job done, and your regular schedule stays untouched.
Managing routes
The Configuration tab shows all your routes in either a List or Map view.
List view. A table with columns for Route Name, Territory, Technicians, and Locations, along with action icons to edit the route, view its territory on the map, or manage its technician assignments.
Map view. All route territories overlaid on a single map so you can see how your service area is divided.
You can filter routes by All, Active, or Inactive using the tabs above the list. The search bar lets you find routes by name, code, or technician.
To edit a route, click the edit icon in its row. The same three-tab form (Route Details, Territory, Technicians) opens so you can change any setting. To deactivate a route, toggle the “Route is active” switch off in Route Details. Inactive routes stop receiving new job assignments but their historical data is preserved.
The Calendar
The Calendar is the operational heart of Routes & Scheduling. It gives you three ways to look at your schedule: Month, Week, and Day.
Month view. A traditional calendar grid showing each day’s total job count and total hours across all routes. Days with issues (overdue jobs, unassigned routes, or unrouted jobs) display a red alert badge with a count. You can filter by a specific route using the dropdown above the calendar, or view all routes at once. Click any day to jump to the Day view for that date.
Week view. A grid with routes as rows and days of the week as columns. Each cell shows the number of jobs, total estimated hours, and an alert badge if there are issues. Cells highlighted in red indicate problems that need attention. An empty cell with a dash means no technician is assigned to that route for that day. A Daily Total row at the bottom sums the jobs and hours across all routes for each day. This view is ideal for spotting imbalances: a route with 7.5 hours on Thursday and 1.5 hours on Tuesday, or a day where total hours across routes exceed your team’s capacity.
Day view. Each route gets its own column with a timeline running down the left side. The column header shows the route name, assigned technician, number of stops, and total estimated hours. Individual jobs appear as blocks on the timeline, positioned at their scheduled time, showing the customer name, scheduled time, service type, and whether it’s a recurring or one-time job. Click any job block to open the job detail panel, where you can see full job information and take action.
Needs Attention
At the top of the Calendar (in any view), a “Needs Attention” button shows a count of items that require action. Clicking it expands a panel that lists every issue, organized into categories.
Overdue Jobs are jobs whose scheduled date has passed without the work being completed. Each item shows the service type, customer name, original date, and how many days overdue it is, along with a “Reschedule” button to move the job to a new date.
Unrouted Jobs are jobs that exist in the system but haven’t been assigned to any route. This typically happens when a customer location doesn’t fall within any route’s territory. Each item shows a “Schedule” button so you can assign it to a route.
These are the same types of issues that appear on the Dashboard, but the Needs Attention panel in Routes & Scheduling gives you the full list with direct action buttons, making it the best place to work through scheduling problems in bulk.
The Map
The Map tab shows a geographic view of your jobs for a specific date. Each job location appears as a numbered pin on the map, where the number indicates how many jobs are at that location. Lines connect the stops to show the route path.
You can navigate between dates, filter by route using the dropdown, and toggle between two color modes:
- By Route colors the pins according to which route they belong to, making it easy to see territory coverage at a glance.
- By Status colors the pins according to job status (scheduled, completed, overdue, etc.), which is useful for tracking progress through the day.
When you filter to a single route, the map zooms to show just that route’s stops and path, giving you a focused view of one technician’s day.
How the schedule comes together
Understanding the relationship between routes and the schedule helps explain why things work the way they do.
When you create a recurring service, Loma generates six months of Pending jobs. These jobs have a date but no specific time. They’re placeholders. Thirty days before a job’s date, the route optimizer runs. It looks at all the Pending jobs for that day, groups them by route based on each customer location’s territory, and calculates the most efficient order of stops. The optimizer considers travel time between locations, each job’s estimated duration, the route’s preferred start time, and the route’s max daily hours and max stops. The result is a Scheduled job with a specific time window, assigned to a route and a technician.
This means you don’t need to manually build a schedule for each day. As long as your routes are configured with territories and technician assignments, Loma handles the scheduling automatically. The Calendar and Map views are where you review what the optimizer has produced and step in when something needs adjustment: an overdue job that needs rescheduling, a day that’s overloaded, or a route that’s missing a technician.