Route optimization for portable toilet and septic trucks
A route that knows when the tank is full.
Plan day assigns every stop to a truck and puts it in order around what a pump route actually runs into: tank capacity, disposal-site hours, service windows, and which truck can carry what.
Sorted is not solved.
Most software orders stops by zip code or by distance from the yard. Trucks cross each other's work all day, and nothing knows where a tank fills up.
Plan day assigns and sequences every stop at once, across every truck, on real roads, so each driver gets a day that fits their shift. Every stop adds gallons. When a truck would cross its dump trigger, 85% unless you change it, a dump stop goes in at a disposal site that's open then, and every arrival after it shifts to match.
Built for a pump truck, not a parcel van.
Plan day weighs all of these in the same pass, across every truck on shift that day.
- Tank capacity
- Each truck's real tank size, and a gallons-per-unit figure that starts at 12 and tunes itself from your own dump logs.
- Disposal sites
- A dump stop only goes to a site that's open at that hour.
- Service windows
- Gated sites, event drop-offs, and priority jobs keep their times.
- What each truck carries
- Sanitation, roll-off, or front-load. A roll-off truck never gets handed a porta-john delivery.
- Territories and drivers
- Drawn territories, a customer's preferred driver, each truck's shift hours, and an optional lunch break inside a window you set.
- Time on site
- Learned per job type from what your crews actually took over the last 90 days. A time you set on one stop still wins.
Plan, check, push.
One page takes a day from a list of jobs to every driver's phone, and you decide at each step.
Plan the day
Pick the day on the week strip, when it starts, which job types go in, and where trucks start and finish. Plan day assigns and orders every stop in one pass. A readiness check flags a job with no address or GPS pin, or a driver routed without a real truck, before anything goes out.Read every driver's load
Each driver's card shows stops, time on site, and drive time before anyone leaves the yard. Put your labor, mileage, and fuel rates in Settings and each route carries an estimated cost too.Lock what you know
Lock a stop to its driver and position, drag another onto a different truck, add a dump stop by hand, and plan again. The rest of the day moves around what you decided.Push to drivers
One step sends every driver their stops. Change the plan after that and a banner says the drivers are on the old version until you push again.
A truck goes down at ten. Rebalance the rest.
Open Rebalance day, untick the driver who's out, and PortaPro re-plans every open stop across the drivers still running. Finished stops are left alone, and a stop a driver has already started stays with them.
With driver location on, each truck starts from where its driver's phone last reported, as long as that was in the last 15 minutes, instead of from the yard. The result lands as a draft beside the published plan. Compare the two, then push.
The weather, stop by stop, before the trucks leave.
Route Plan reads the National Weather Service forecast for every stop on the day, up to six days out, and says what changes the work: high wind at the stops where tents and units can tip, freezing where tanks, valves and hand-wash water are at risk, and snow where access gets hard. Click the strip for each stop and its detail, like gusts of 45 mph or a low of 18°F.
An active weather alert for your yard sits above the planner, and the dispatch map has a live radar layer. These are planning guides for dispatch, not a safety rating for any tent or unit.
Questions operators ask
Which plan is route planning on?
Route Plan and Plan day are on every plan, Starter included. Automatic dump stops read each truck's tank size, which is set in Fleet Management, and Fleet Management starts on Core.
What happens when the day doesn't fit?
Plan day lists the stops it couldn't place and why: no truck carries that equipment, the load is over capacity, the time window can't be reached, or it falls outside every shift. Fix it and plan again, or choose Plan anyway and the day builds without those stops. They stay unassigned until you place them.
Can I change a route after it's planned?
Yes. Drag a stop to another position or another truck, lock the ones that must not move, add a dump stop by hand, or plan again. Drivers can't re-route themselves; route changes are a dispatcher decision, pushed to their app.
Where does the weather come from, and does it cost extra?
The National Weather Service, the free official U.S. forecast, so there's nothing extra to pay or connect. It covers today through the next six days, the range the Weather Service forecasts. Stops without a map location aren't checked.
Do recurring service stops have to be added every week?
No. The service frequency on each rate card row creates the service jobs on its own, a few days before each visit is due. Plan day routes them with whatever else is on that day, and Optimize week does every day on the strip in one run.
