Routing for in-home lessons

If your teachers drive to students' homes, the hard part of scheduling is not the calendar — it is the road between two lessons. Routing answers one question: where can this new student fit without wrecking somebody's afternoon?

It is included on the Plus and Pro plans. On Core the page explains the upgrade rather than pretending the feature is there.

What it needs first

The page opens with a readiness checklist, and it will tell you which items are still outstanding. Two of them are yours:

• Teacher availability — each teacher needs weekly availability windows, set on their page under Admin → Teachers. Without them there is nothing to search.

• Client addresses — students need a home address that has been resolved to a map location. Review addresses under Admin → Clients.

The other two are map-service configuration for the whole platform. If the checklist flags those, they are not something you can fix from Settings — open a support ticket.

Running an inquiry

An inquiry is the request you have just taken: an address, the instrument, and how long the lesson should be. Encore then works through every teacher's free time, measures the real drive to and from that address, and keeps only the slots that are actually possible.

Reading the results

Suggestions are grouped by teacher and ranked by cushion — the time left over once the drive is taken out of the gap. A big cushion is a relaxed afternoon; a small one is a teacher arriving with their coat still on.

• Standalone — so much room that this is really its own trip rather than a stop on a route.

• Optimal — comfortable slack around the drive.

• Less optimal — it works, with less room than you would like.

• Not optimal — tight. Possible, but everything has to go right.

A slot where the drive simply does not fit the gap is never offered at all — you are not asked to judge an impossible trip.

A suggestion further away than your usual limit is flagged, not hidden. Some students are worth the drive, and that is your call rather than the software's.

Recent inquiries

Inquiries you have run are kept on the page, so a family who calls back next week does not mean starting again.