The day Tom stopped guessing the way to his customers

Tom fits shop-front signs for a living. Tuesday meant five visits across three towns, and, as usual, he planned the route the way he always had: a sticky note, a hunch and a prayer.

He started the morning by typing the first customer's address from an email into his phone, getting the postcode wrong, driving to the wrong industrial estate and phoning Brightside Dental to ask where, exactly, they were. Not his finest hour. By the time he got home that evening he still had a shoebox of fuel receipts and a vague memory of how far he'd gone.

Addresses that fix themselves

The next week his business partner set up Couchwork's maps. An admin pastes a Mapbox token into Settings → Integrations. It's Tom's own Mapbox account (Mapbox has a free monthly allowance, and anything beyond it is billed to that account), and maps stay switched off until it's added.

Now when Tom adds a customer, he starts typing the address and picks it from the suggestions. No typos, no half-remembered postcodes. The place is saved on the contact, ready for the map.

Every lead, on a map

Flip the pipeline from Board to Map and suddenly Tom can see his business as geography. A cluster of warm leads in the same town? That's a Thursday. One stray quote on the far side of the county? It can wait, or it can be bundled with something else. Pins are coloured by stage. Click one for a summary and an Open lead button. (Leads whose customer has no address saved can't be pinned, so they aren't drawn.)

"I used to plan my week by town names. Now I plan it by what's actually on the map."

Plan the day, pick the order, go

For Tuesday's visits, Tom added the five leads he was seeing as stops (up to eleven fit in one trip) and pressed Best order. Couchwork worked out a good route, with the road distance and driving time for the whole trip. When he knew better (the dental practice doesn't open until ten), he moved a stop up or down and the figures updated.

He used to burn an hour on this. It now takes about thirty seconds.

Mileage, without the shoebox

Here's the part Tom's accountant likes. Once a trip is planned, he saves it and it goes into his mileage log, grouped by month with totals, and he can export it as a CSV for his expenses. Each person's log is private to them, so the team's mileage isn't anyone else's business.

Distances are road distances worked out by Mapbox, so check them against your own figures before you claim. But month-end no longer starts from a shoebox.