Territory management

The map is the source of truth, not the spreadsheet.

Most territory arguments are really arguments about which copy of the spreadsheet is current. Keep the boundaries in one place, version them, and the argument becomes a question with an answer.

Five ways to draw the same thing

Territories arrive differently depending on how a business grew. All five produce the same kind of shape, and a decision made against any of them is made the same way.

  • Draw it

    Click a boundary onto the map. Useful for the areas that follow a road or a river rather than anything a dataset knows about.

  • A radius around a branch

    Pick a location and a distance. The circle sits on the true great-circle distance, so a fifty mile radius in Alaska is fifty miles rather than fifty miles at the equator.

  • A list of ZIP codes

    Paste up to forty. Boundaries come from the Census Bureau, and any ZIP with no published area is named on screen rather than quietly dropped.

  • Counties and states

    Type "Henrico County, VA" or "VA". An ambiguous name is refused rather than resolved to whichever match came back first.

  • A file you already have

    Import GeoJSON. Existing territories are matched by your own reference, so a re-import replaces its own outlines instead of stacking a second copy on top.

What it checks before you publish

A territory map is wrong in three ways, and all three are invisible from the map itself.

  • Overlaps, named in pairs

    Not a count. The report says which two territories cover the same ground, and clicking one puts both on the map.

  • Territories assigned to nobody

    An area with no branch behind it resolves to nobody, which looks identical to working until somebody in it calls.

  • References that no longer resolve

    A territory pointing at an archived location blocks the publish rather than warning about it, because the resolver would answer confidently and wrongly.

What it does not do

It does not merge overlapping territories into one outline. Where two areas cover the same address, the lower priority number wins, and the report tells you the overlap is there. Dissolving them would mean guessing which one you meant.

It does not import KML or shapefiles yet. GeoJSON only, and the builders above for everything else.

County and state boundaries are the Census Bureau's 1:500,000 outlines. They sit within a few hundred metres of the legal line, which is the right precision for deciding who serves an address and the wrong precision for a property dispute.