Food truck scheduling software
Two gigs, sixty kilometres apart, half an hour between them.
The check nobody else runs
It is not about the clock
Every scheduling tool will stop you booking 11:00 twice. Almost none of them know how far apart the two jobs are — so here is the actual check, drawn.
Coburg twilight market
11:00 – 15:30. Already on the diary, with an address on it.
The 16:00 enquiry in Frankston
Half an hour after the first gig ends, and 62 minutes of road in between.
01Both ends must carry coordinates. Without them there is no distance to work with and the evaluator falls back to overlap plus your fixed buffers.
02Straight-line distance at 60 km/h, not a routed drive time. What it gives you is a floor: the trip cannot take less than this.
03Set travel speed to 0 and the whole calculation is skipped. It is a setting, not a law.
04The same evaluator answers your public booking form, so a date that fails here is never offered to a customer.
Put plainly
15:30 and 16:00 do not overlap. The 62 minutes between them do.
checkAvailability.ts — the first event's effective window is extended by haversine_km ÷ travelSpeedKmh × 60 before anything else is allowed to start.
What it schedules
The truck, the day and the people in it
Four separate constraints, and a gig needs all four to be free.
- 1
- diary per truck
- 62
- minutes of road, counted
- 0
- accounts a casual needs
- 2
- kinds of block
A second van is its own outlet, with its own days and hours.
62 km at 60 km/h — one travel speed, set once for the business.
A callout is a text with a link. They tap yes or no; nothing is installed and nothing is billed.
A confirmed booking and a hold on a nearly-confirmed one block a slot the same way.
Where it is honest about itself
What the drive check cannot do
This is a straight-line calculation, not a routing engine, and the difference matters on some days more than others.
It measures as the crow flies
Straight-line distance at a speed you set, not a road route. On a motorway that is generous; through a city on a Friday it is optimistic, and you can lower the speed to compensate — though it is one speed for the whole business, not per truck.
It does not know about traffic
There is no live traffic feed behind it. What it gives you is a floor — the drive cannot take less than this — which is the half that stops a double-booking.
It needs an address on both
No coordinates on either side and there is no distance to work with, so it falls back to overlap plus your fixed buffers. It says nothing rather than inventing a drive.
Who it is not for
Where this is the wrong tool
You trade one pitch, every week
Same corner, same hours, no travel between jobs. There is no scheduling problem here for software to solve.
You need shift swaps and timesheets
Crew are rostered and called out; they do not have logins to swap shifts between themselves, and hours are not clocked in and out.
You want routed drive times
If your margins turn on the difference between a routed forty minutes and a straight-line thirty, this is not precise enough and you should not pretend it is.
Questions
What operators ask about scheduling
- Can it stop me double-booking the truck?
- Yes, and further than that: it accounts for the drive. Where both jobs have an address it adds 62 km ÷ 60 km/h worth of minutes between them, so two gigs that do not overlap on the clock can still be refused because you could not physically get there.
- What if a gig has no address?
- Then there is no distance to work with and it falls back to a plain overlap check plus your fixed buffers. It degrades honestly rather than guessing at a drive it cannot measure.
- Does the public booking widget respect it?
- That is the point of it. The same availability engine answers your own website’s booking form, so a date you cannot actually work is never offered to a customer in the first place.
- How do I roster crew onto a shift?
- From the event, or from the week. Anyone short gets a callout as a text with a link they tap yes or no on — no account and no app, so a casual who works four Saturdays a year costs you nothing to roster.
- Can I run two trucks?
- Yes. Each truck is its own outlet with its own diary, so the overlap and drive checks run per truck rather than across the business, and each can override the operating days and hours it trades. What is set once for the whole business rather than per truck is the policy around it — lead time, how far ahead you take bookings, and the travel speed the drive is calculated at.