How do I plan the most efficient delivery run for a day of orders?

Use Route Optimisation, on the Business plan. Give it a day's deliveries and it returns the order to drive them in, with an estimated arrival time for each stop, planned around the delivery windows your customers already chose. It works from traffic-aware travel times rather than raw distance.

What it is actually optimising

Distance is the least interesting input. The plan is built from four things:

• Traffic-aware travel times between your bakery and each address.
• The customer's delivery window, applied as a strong preference rather than a hard cutoff. Arriving early or late carries a penalty the optimiser works to avoid, but it will still produce a complete route instead of refusing to place a stop it cannot hit perfectly. You set how much slack counts as early and how much lateness is tolerable.
• Time at the door. Each stop is given a duration, so the sequence is not built on the assumption that a delivery is instantaneous. A wedding venue where you set up on site is not a doorstep handover.
• Running cost. Fuel or energy is estimated from your own vehicle efficiency and price, in kilometres per litre or miles per gallon depending on your unit system, and tolls are costed for the actual roads the route uses. Vehicle type covers petrol, diesel, hybrid and electric, so an electric van is not costed as though it burned fuel.

You choose whether the run ends back at the bakery or at the last stop.

One vehicle at a time

A run is optimised per vehicle, leaving from your bakery. With two drivers, split the day and optimise each run.

The numbers are estimates

Arrival times come from traffic modelling, not from a promise. They are good enough to sequence a day and to tell a customer roughly when to expect you, and not good enough to publish as a guaranteed time. Treat toll and fuel figures the same way: they are there so you can compare one plan against another, and so you know what a distant delivery costs you before you agree to it.

Where this does not apply

• Route Optimisation, Driver Management and Proof of Delivery are Business plan features. On other plans you can still set delivery windows and work from the day's delivery list.
• A route is only as good as the addresses. An address that cannot be located cannot be sequenced.
• Trade rounds are the usual reason to want this. If most of your run is cafes rather than doorsteps, see selling wholesale.