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Covering an address and being able to serve it are different questions
Most routing tools answer the first one. The job that goes wrong is almost always the second: the nearest crew who does not do gas, the same-day promise that was ninety minutes away, the street that a ZIP code boundary cut in half.
Three ways a dispatch goes wrong
- The nearest crew cannot do the job
- Distance is the easiest thing to measure and the least useful thing to decide on. A plumbing job sent to an HVAC-only branch is a wasted dispatch and a customer who was told somebody was coming.
- Coverage that stops at the ZIP code edge
- ZIP codes are delivery routes, not service areas. Half a street on the wrong side of one is a customer told nobody serves them, in a road your crews drive down every day.
- A yes the schedule cannot keep
- The website says you cover it, the booking is taken, and dispatch discovers the drive time. The customer heard a promise; the crew inherited an argument.
Capability is part of the answer, not a note on it
Every branch carries what it can actually do. When an address resolves, the branches that cover it are filtered by whether they can do this job before anything is assigned, so "nobody can take this" is a real answer rather than a dispatch that fails later.
The same applies to hours and to the fallbacks you have already agreed: a named backup branch, or an honest no. What you should not get is a confident answer that dispatch has to undo.
Addresses, not ZIP codes
An address is geocoded to a point and tested against your actual boundaries, so a street that straddles a ZIP code edge is decided by where the house is rather than by which list the ZIP code ended up on. The precision is reported too: a decision made from a rooftop match deserves more confidence than one made from a ZIP code centroid, and you can see which you got.
You can try that on any address, without an account, on the free lookup.
What it does not do
It does not schedule. It answers who should take a job and why; which van, in what order, on which day is the field service system's question and it is a good question that this is not an answer to.
It does not know today's traffic. Drive time here is about the shape of a service area rather than about this afternoon, and a tool that pretended otherwise would be guessing with a straight face.