What is a round? Designing it in software

Part 4 of 39 of Building TradeYoke, the story of how the platform was built, from January 2024 to today. Previous: Why window cleaning rounds drift, and what a good one looks like. Next: The customer record a window cleaner actually needs. See every part on the build timeline.

Quick answer: In TradeYoke a round is a named list of properties, each with its own frequency, price and next-due date, in an order you can change. It is not a rigid timetable. Rounds can be created, reordered, retired and merged, so the list can change as your business does.

• A round in TradeYoke is a named list of stops, not a fixed timetable.
• Frequency and price belong to each property, so one round can hold every-four-week and every-eight-week customers.
• Rounds can be created, reordered, retired and merged as the business changes.

When we sat down in March 2024 to design the core of TradeYoke, the first question was what a round is. People say "my Tuesday round" and everyone knows what they mean, but turning that into something software can hold is harder than it sounds. We came to a plain answer: a round is a named list of properties, in an order, each with its own rhythm.

• The round has a name, like "Tuesday north" or "Hillside". It is how people talk about their work, so it is how the software should too.
• Frequency belongs to the property, not the round. One round can hold customers every four weeks and customers every eight. If frequency belonged to the round, you would end up with two rounds pretending to be one.
• Order is separate from frequency. The order is the way you drive the round. It can change without touching anything else about a customer.
• A round has to be able to change. In the product today you can create, reorder, retire and merge rounds, and find customers who are not on any round yet. A round that cannot change is a round people leave.

We did not try to build the clever parts in March. No routing, no optimisation, no weather. A round that is easy to read, easy to change and true is the foundation. Plan my day and the route ordering came much later, once the round underneath could be trusted.

Because the round is a first-class thing, other parts of TradeYoke can use it: the schedule shows a round as a day's work, and the job wizard has a "which round" step. You can see how this works today on the scheduling and rounds page.

With the round defined, the next piece was the thing a round is made of: the customer. That is the next article in the series.

Related: Scheduling and rounds · Window cleaning software · Getting your first round into TradeYoke · Pricing · The build timeline