I work for a small/medium (~10-15 employees) non-profit agency where our employees are expected to visit up to 30 clients per month to fulfill a court-imposed requirement for us to see them within that timeframe.
There are a number of paid services that offer to plan efficient routes given a number of inputs, and some free ones, but the free services I have seen are quite limited (e.g.: https://planner.myrouteonline.com/ does not allow you to disallow usage of toll roads).
We reimburse employees for their mileage but in an effort to reduce reimbursement and miles driven, we would like to provide employees with access to a system that just lets them plug in the addresses and get a fairly optimized route.
There is the Google Maps TSP Solver
https://github.com/tzmartin/Google-Maps-TSP-Solver but this looks like it requires a Maps API Key, which is expensive on its own, however...
Google offers a "Google for Nonprofits" account which, I believe, offers a monthly credit of about $200-$250 for the Maps API.
I am interested in setting this up for our nonprofit but first wanted to check with HN to see if anyone has done something like this before. I am not a programmer and would be wading into this basically blind, so any insight from someone who has been in the same boat would be highly illustrative.
There are a number of paid services that offer to plan efficient routes given a number of inputs, and some free ones, but the free services I have seen are quite limited (e.g.: https://planner.myrouteonline.com/ does not allow you to disallow usage of toll roads).
We reimburse employees for their mileage but in an effort to reduce reimbursement and miles driven, we would like to provide employees with access to a system that just lets them plug in the addresses and get a fairly optimized route.
There is the Google Maps TSP Solver https://github.com/tzmartin/Google-Maps-TSP-Solver but this looks like it requires a Maps API Key, which is expensive on its own, however...
Google offers a "Google for Nonprofits" account which, I believe, offers a monthly credit of about $200-$250 for the Maps API.
I am interested in setting this up for our nonprofit but first wanted to check with HN to see if anyone has done something like this before. I am not a programmer and would be wading into this basically blind, so any insight from someone who has been in the same boat would be highly illustrative.
Thank you!