Hourly Planner for Dispatch and Routing

An hourly planner for dispatch and routing is not a grid you fill in. It’s a set of decisions about where your hours go, made once so you don’t have to make them again at 6am with the phone ringing.

Most owners running their own deliveries already have the grid. What they don’t have is an answer to the question underneath it: how much can one hour hold? Until you know that, every schedule you write is a guess, and the guess is usually optimistic. Nine stops get promised into an hour that fits six, the driver leaves twenty minutes late, and by the third address the whole afternoon has slid.

This post covers how to allocate each hour of a delivery day: how many stops fit, when orders have to stop coming in, how wide your delivery windows should be, when routes leave, and what gets moved when an hour goes wrong. If you’re further along and shopping for software to hold the plan, the scheduling apps to compare when you run your own deliveries are covered separately.

The Bottom Line

• Plan hours by capacity, not by wishful thinking: count your completed stops per hour before you promise anything.
• Your order cutoff time is a routing decision, not a sales one. Every order accepted after the route is built costs more than it earns.
• Narrow delivery windows reduce routing flexibility and can increase the number of vehicles needed to cover the same stops (Upper, retrieved 2026-09-30).
• Failed first attempts run 8% to 20% depending on geography and delivery type, at an average $17.78 per failed package (Loqate 2020, via SmartRoutes, retrieved 2026-09-30).
• Build one hour of slack into the middle of the day. It is the cheapest insurance an hourly plan can carry.

What an hourly planner for dispatch and routing does

It converts promises into hours. Everything a delivery business sells (a two-hour window, a same-day add-on, a Saturday morning drop) is a claim on a specific hour of a specific day. An hourly planner is where you check whether that hour is still available before you sell it again.

That makes it different from a route. A route answers “in what order?” The hourly plan answers “by when, and with whose time?” You can have a perfectly optimized route that is undeliverable because the van can’t leave until 11am and the first window closes at 11:30.

The hour blocks aren’t there to make the day feel organized, either. Each block exists because something concrete happens in it: an order stops being accepted, a load gets built, a vehicle leaves, a driver’s shift ends.

How many delivery stops fit in one hour

Count yours. Stops per hour is completed stops divided by hours on the road, which makes it a clean proxy for how well your day is sequenced (Routella, retrieved 2026-09-30). It’s the one number the whole hourly plan rests on.

Resist the urge to use a figure you read somewhere. The numbers that circulate for drops per hour come almost entirely from software marketing, and they describe dense urban parcel work, not a florist doing twelve hand-delivered arrangements across three suburbs. Your own last four weeks are better data than anyone’s benchmark.

To get a usable number, take a normal week and log three things per stop: arrival time, departure time, and whether anything went wrong. Then work out the average for each type of area you serve. Most operations end up with two or three different rates: tight downtown blocks, spread-out residential, and the one industrial park where the loading dock eats fifteen minutes every time.

A few things quietly shrink the number, and they belong in the hour you plan, not in the margin you hope for:

• Parking and the walk from vehicle to door, which in a dense commercial street can exceed the drive between stops.
• Signature, photo, or hand-over at the door, especially where someone has to be found.
• Anything refrigerated, fragile, or assembled on site. The trays a catering business hands over, or a floral arrangement that needs carrying upright, rarely move from vehicle to recipient in ninety seconds.
• Failed attempts. Each one costs a return trip later, and address errors alone account for 45% of failed deliveries (Shipsy 2024, via SmartRoutes, retrieved 2026-09-30).

Once you have your own rate, plan to about 85% of it. The last 15% is what absorbs a late order, a wrong address, or a driver caught behind a garbage truck.

Setting an order cutoff time you can defend

Your cutoff is the hour that protects every other hour. Pick it by working backwards from when the vehicle has to leave: departure time, minus loading, minus picking and packing, minus however long it takes you to build and check the route. If the van leaves at 9am and that chain takes three hours, your cutoff is 6am the same day, or far more likely 4pm the day before.

Owners hate cutoffs because they look like turning away money. The arithmetic usually says otherwise. An order accepted after the route is built doesn’t slot in; it re-sequences a day that was already balanced, which pushes every downstream window later and puts stops that were comfortable into jeopardy. The one order earns you its margin. Three late windows can cost you the customers behind them.

Two habits make a cutoff hold up in practice. First, publish it where customers see it before they order, not in a reply after. Second, decide in advance what the exception costs (a surcharge, a next-day slot, or a place on tomorrow’s first run) so that saying yes doesn’t mean rebuilding the plan on instinct.

How wide to make your delivery time windows

Use the narrowest window your operation can consistently support and the customer needs (Upper, retrieved 2026-09-30). That phrasing matters in both directions. Narrow beyond what you can hold and you’re selling failures; wide beyond what the customer needs and you’re giving away a selling point for nothing.

Window width is the single biggest lever on how much an hour can hold, because it decides how much freedom the route has. Narrow windows reduce routing flexibility and can increase the number of vehicles required to complete all the stops (Upper, retrieved 2026-09-30). Two-hour windows are common for consumer deliveries, while four-hour or half-day windows suit deliveries with less predictable durations.

Weigh the customer side properly, because a convenient slot is not a minor preference: in a Capgemini Research Institute consumer survey, 73% of shoppers said a convenient delivery time slot mattered more to them than fast delivery (cited by Routific, retrieved 2026-09-30). Convenient is doing the work in that sentence, not narrow. A four-hour window a customer chose beats a one-hour window you assigned.

Dispatch waves and route departure times

Departure time is the hour you should be most stubborn about. Everything downstream inherits its delay, and a route that leaves twenty minutes late does not catch up. It just arrives twenty minutes late at every stop and then late again, because the first missed window creates a wait or a return.

If you run more than one vehicle or more than one run per day, split the day into waves rather than dispatching everything at once. A wave is a departure time with a defined load behind it: a first wave carrying yesterday’s confirmed orders that has to be on the road early, and a second wave carrying today’s cutoff that leaves once picking is done. Waves are also how same-day work gets handled without touching the morning plan.

Set each wave’s departure as a hard time and put the preparation before it, with names attached:

• The pick and pack block, which has to finish before loading starts rather than overlapping it.
• The load block, sized to the vehicle and the product. Trays and buckets of water take longer to secure than boxes.
• The route check, five minutes where someone looks at the sequence against the windows and catches the stop that can’t be made.
• Departure, which is a time, not “when we’re ready”.

A delivery day laid out hour by hour

On a clock, in a small operation with two vehicles and an afternoon of same-day orders to absorb, it comes out like this.

The morning is prepared work: production finishes, yesterday’s orders are picked against a route built the night before, and the first wave leaves at 9am into windows that start at 9:30. Nothing in that block is decided on the day, which is why it’s the most reliable part of the schedule and the right place to put your most demanding customers.

Midday is where the slack lives. From roughly 11am to 12pm, nothing is promised. That hour exists to absorb the first-wave stop that failed, the order that came in at 10:45 that you decide to take anyway, and the driver who hit traffic. Operations that skip this hour don’t save it. They spend it anyway, out of the afternoon, at a worse exchange rate.

The afternoon carries the second wave: cutoff closes around midday, picking runs while the first vehicle is still out, and the second departure lands early afternoon with windows through to close. The last hour of the day belongs to neither wave. It’s for proof of delivery, chasing the two stops that didn’t land, and building tomorrow’s route while today is still fresh enough to remember.

What to move when an hour slips

Decide the order of sacrifice before you need it. When an hour goes wrong, you have four things you can give up, and in a hurry people give up the wrong one:

• Window width first: call the customer and widen the window before you miss it. A heads-up that turns a 1pm-3pm into a 2pm-5pm keeps the delivery and the relationship.
• Sequence second: re-order the remaining stops around what’s still achievable rather than pushing on through a route that is now out of date.
• Scope third: move the least time-sensitive stop to tomorrow’s first wave, and tell that customer before they notice.
• Your own hours last, and knowingly: covering a bad afternoon by working until 9pm is a defensible option once. As a pattern, it’s a capacity problem wearing a costume.

The point of writing that order down is that it takes the decision out of the moment. At 2pm with a stranded driver, you are not in a good state to decide which customer disappoints least.

Which hours belong to you, not to the routes

The plan has to include the person running it. Owner-operators consistently schedule their business to the hour and leave their own time as whatever is left over, which is how dispatch ends up interleaved with everything else and done badly.

Protect three blocks by name. One for building tomorrow’s route, ideally at the end of the day rather than the start, when you know what happened. One for customer contact, batched, so that answering “where is my order?” isn’t interrupting a load. And one that has nothing to do with today’s deliveries at all: pricing, a supplier conversation, hiring. The operation only ever gets better in that hour.

Software helps here, but only with the holding, not the deciding. The app you choose determines how easily the plan survives contact with a bad day: whether a window change reaches the driver, whether a shift swap is visible, whether tomorrow’s route is one click from today’s. That’s a different question from this one, and the comparison of scheduling apps for delivery operations works through the options and what they cost.

Frequently asked questions

What is an hourly planner used for in a delivery business?

It’s used to allocate the working day in hour blocks tied to concrete events: when orders stop being accepted, when picking and loading happen, when each vehicle leaves, which windows are promised in which hours, and where the slack sits. Its job is to check that an hour is still free before you sell it again.

How many stops should I schedule per hour?

Use your own measured rate rather than an industry figure, then plan to roughly 85% of it. Log arrival and departure times for a normal week, split the result by area type, and treat dense commercial, spread-out residential, and awkward-access stops as different rates.

What time should my delivery cutoff be?

Work backwards from departure. Subtract loading, picking and packing, and route building from the time the vehicle has to be on the road. For most small operations that lands the cutoff late the previous afternoon rather than the same morning.

Are one-hour delivery windows worth offering?

Only where you can hold them consistently. Narrow windows cut routing flexibility and can push you into an extra vehicle to cover the same stops, and a missed one-hour window damages trust more than a wide window that was hit. Customers value a convenient slot more than a fast one.

How much slack should a delivery day have?

About an hour, placed in the middle rather than at the end. Midday slack absorbs failed attempts and same-day additions you choose to accept while there’s still road time left to use it; slack at 5pm can only absorb overtime.

Start with the hour you have, not the one you wanted

The whole plan follows from one measured number. Measure what a stop takes, build the day at 85% of that rate, put the cutoff where the route can survive it, and keep one hour in the middle unsold.

Then leave it alone for a month. Hourly plans get rewritten constantly by owners chasing the day that went wrong, and the churn hides the pattern. Run the same shape for four weeks, note where it broke, and change one block: the cutoff, the window width, or the departure time. That is how a schedule stops being a guess.