What's the fastest way to get stops into a dispatch tool?

It depends on where your orders live. If they're in a spreadsheet, import the CSV or Excel file directly. If they arrive as a paper manifest or a printed order list, use AI-assisted import — snap a photo and let the tool extract the addresses, then review them before optimizing. For a handful of ad-hoc stops, pasting a list is quickest.

How should routes be split between multiple drivers?

Don't split by hand. Let the optimizer balance the stops across your drivers while respecting real constraints — zones, delivery time windows, vehicle capacity, and shift hours. A good tool lets you choose a strategy (balance stops evenly, balance drive time, or fastest overall) and then drag-and-drop to fine-tune before you send.

How do I send a route to a driver once it's planned?

With modern dispatch software you send optimized routes straight to each driver's phone app in one click — no group chats, screenshots, or texting addresses one by one. In Routerra Teams the route appears in the driver app instantly, and it keeps working even if the driver later loses signal.

How do I know a delivery actually happened?

Use a driver app with proof of delivery. Drivers mark each stop delivered or not-delivered (with a structured reason when something goes wrong), and capture a photo or PDF at the door. From the dispatcher side you see every status update as it happens, review the proof stop by stop, and can notify the customer automatically when a delivery's status changes.

What does it cost to dispatch to multiple drivers with Routerra Teams?

Routerra Teams is $25 per driver seat per month, or $20 per seat per month billed annually. There's no minimum fleet size — it works from your first vehicle up to around 20 — and proof of delivery and customer notifications are included, not add-ons. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial.

How to Dispatch Routes to Multiple Drivers

Getting one route right is a solved problem — you drop your stops in, optimize, and drive. Getting routes to several drivers every morning is where it falls apart. Stops land in a spreadsheet, you split them by hand, you ping each driver in the group chat, and when a customer calls to ask where their order is, you're guessing.

It doesn't have to work that way. Dispatching to multiple drivers is really four repeatable steps: gather the stops, optimize with real constraints, assign and send, then track what happened. This guide walks each one — the general method first, then how to do it cleanly with Routerra Teams as a concrete example.

Step 1: Gather every stop in one place

Before you can route anything, every stop for the day has to live in one place. Orders rarely arrive in one tidy format, so your import options matter more than they sound. There are three that cover almost every case:

Paste a list. For a handful of ad-hoc stops, copy the addresses in and go. Fastest for small or last-minute jobs.
Import a spreadsheet. If your orders already live in a CSV or Excel file — exported from your order system, or maintained by hand — import it directly. This is the workhorse for most dispatchers.
Snap a photo of the manifest. When orders come in as a printed run sheet or a handwritten order list, retyping them is the slow tax nobody budgets for. AI-assisted import reads the addresses off a photo so you don't have to. You review the extracted stops before optimizing, so a misread never quietly makes it onto a route.

In Routerra Teams all three are built in, plus a shared team address book for the regular stops you hit every week. The goal of this step is simple: no address should exist only in someone's inbox or on a sticky note by the time you optimize.

While you're here, add the details that make a route realistic rather than just short — per-stop time windows (the 9-to-11 slot you promised), priority flags, service time at each stop, and load if capacity is a factor. These are what separate a route that looks good on a map from one a driver can actually run.

Step 2: Optimize with the constraints that actually matter

This is the step people do worst by hand. Splitting stops across drivers by eyeballing a map — "you take the north side, you take downtown" — leaves miles and minutes on the table and quietly overloads whoever's fastest. The whole point of an optimizer is to balance the work across your drivers and honor the rules you can't break.

The constraints worth setting up front:

Zones. Draw the areas each driver covers and set them as hard rules — allowed or excluded per driver. Now the optimizer never hands your Brooklyn driver a Manhattan stop.
Time windows. A route that's short but blows every appointment isn't optimized; it's just short. Windows keep the sequence honest.
Vehicle capacity and max stops. A cargo bike and a van don't carry the same load. Set capacity and a per-driver stop ceiling so no one is over-assigned.
Shift hours. Routes should fit the day your drivers actually work, not spill past clock-out.

Routerra Teams lets you pick the strategy that fits today's goal — balance stops evenly, balance drive time, go fastest overall, or a balanced mix — and set vehicle profiles for cars, vans, trucks, bikes, and scooters. Routing accounts for live traffic, and you can avoid tolls or highways when a vehicle needs to. The result is a set of routes that already respect your zones, windows, and capacity before you've touched them.

The payoff is measurable: the same stops, in the right order, mean fewer miles, less fuel and wear, and drivers home sooner. That's the number to watch when you compare tools — total miles and time across the whole fleet, not just how pretty one route looks.

Step 3: Assign and dispatch in one click

You've got balanced, rule-respecting routes. Now they have to reach the people driving them — and this is the step where most small fleets lose the time they just saved. Screenshotting a route into a group chat, texting addresses one at a time, reassigning a stop by messaging two drivers and hoping they both saw it: it works until it doesn't.

The clean version is one-click send. Each driver's optimized route goes straight to their phone app. No copy-paste, no "did you get the updated list?"

A good dispatch tool also lets you adjust without starting over:

Drag and drop to refine a route, move a stop from one driver to another, or split a route between drivers when someone calls in sick.
Export any route to CSV, XLSX, or PDF for the drivers or systems that still want a file.

In Routerra Teams, once you approve the plan, every route lands in that driver's app instantly — and, crucially, it keeps working even after they've left signal behind (more on that below).

Step 4: Track what happened — and prove it

Dispatching isn't done when the routes go out. The half that separates a real dispatch operation from a group chat is knowing — and being able to prove — what happened at each door.

Three things to look for:

Live status visibility. As your drivers work, you want to see each delivery update as it happens: delivered, or not-delivered with a structured reason (wrong address, business closed, no one home). That's the difference between answering a customer in ten seconds and calling the driver to ask. (Note this is status-based visibility — you're seeing delivery updates roll in, not watching vehicles move on a live map.)
Proof of delivery. When a customer disputes a delivery, "it was left at the door" is worth a lot more with a photo or PDF attached to that exact stop, timestamped. Your dispatcher should be able to open any stop and see the proof.
Customer notifications. Instead of fielding "where's my order?" calls, let the system send an automatic SMS or email when a delivery's status changes — using your own templates.

Routerra Teams does all three: statuses and failure reasons stream in as drivers work, photo and PDF proof of delivery attach per stop and are visible from the dispatcher app, and status-change notifications go out to recipients automatically. Behind it all sits a full audit log of who did what and when — so the record exists whether or not anyone ever disputes a delivery.

Doing it cleanly: the driver app is where plans meet reality

Here's the part that quietly breaks most multi-driver setups: deliveries happen where the signal doesn't. Basements, loading docks, parking garages, rural dead zones. If your driver app freezes the moment a bar drops, your carefully dispatched route stalls and your status board goes stale.

Routerra Teams' driver app is offline-first. Marking a stop delivered, adding a note, or capturing a proof photo all work with no connection — the changes queue on the phone and sync automatically the moment signal comes back. Your driver never stands in a stairwell waiting for a bar to reappear, and you don't get a hole in your records. It's the single feature we'd point a new fleet at first, because it's the one that fails silently everywhere else.

The app also hands off navigation to whatever your drivers already know — Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze — and runs in four languages with a dark mode for early and late shifts. Roles keep it tidy: Owners run billing and see everything, Managers plan and dispatch, and Drivers see only their own routes on their own phone.

What it costs

Transparent pricing makes this whole workflow easy to commit to. Routerra Teams is $25 per driver seat per month, or $20 per seat per month billed annually (about 20% off). A few things worth saying plainly:

No minimum fleet size. One van is a valid team. Start with your first driver and add seats as you grow — you're never told you're too small.
Everything's included. Proof of delivery and customer notifications aren't add-ons with their own monthly fee — they're in the price, along with webhooks and the Optimize API if you want to feed stops in from your own system.
A 7-day free trial to start, and the self-serve plan runs from one van up to around 20 vehicles.

The bottom line

Dispatching to multiple drivers is four steps, every morning: gather the stops (paste, import a spreadsheet, or snap a photo of the manifest), optimize with the constraints that matter (zones, time windows, capacity, shift hours), assign and send in one click, and track what happened with statuses, proof, and notifications. Do those four cleanly and the morning scramble turns into a few minutes at a screen.

If you want to run that workflow without stitching together spreadsheets and group chats, take a look at Routerra Teams — the same optimization drivers already trust, plus a dispatcher command center and an offline-first driver app. You can start a free trial and dispatch your first multi-driver run tomorrow morning.