How to organise your collection routes
By Equipo Prestafolio
Grouping by zone, by frequency and by real capacity, not alphabetical order. How to design a route a collector can actually complete every day without burning out.
A poorly organised route does not fail because the collector is lazy: it fails because you asked them to do something impossible. The most common mistake is building a collector's book in the order clients happened to be registered, without thinking about the map or the clock. The result is a collector who covers more distance than collections, and a portfolio where arrears climb not because clients do not want to pay, but because nobody ever showed up that day.
The three axes of a well-built route
A route gets organised by crossing three things, not just one:
Axis | What it solves |
|---|---|
Geographic zone | How much time gets lost moving from one client to the next |
Collection frequency | Which clients absolutely must be seen today, and which can wait |
Real collector capacity | How many visits they can actually make in a working day, not how many "should" fit on paper |
Grouping by zone alone, without looking at frequency, throws a daily client into the same route as a monthly one who happens to live nearby, and the monthly one ends up soaking up time it did not need assigned today. Grouping by frequency alone, without looking at zone, sends the collector crisscrossing the city three times in the same morning.
Start with the zone
Split your book into geographic zones a collector can cover on foot or with whatever transport they use, without long jumps between one client and the next. A well-defined zone has a clear start and end (a neighbourhood, a sector, a radius of a few streets), not "the north side of the city" in general.
If you have more than one collector, the question that decides how many zones you need is not "how many collectors do I have," it is how many clients can one collector properly cover in the zone. A zone that is too big for a single collector still looks fine on a map, but on the street it produces the same thing as a badly built route: visits that never arrive on time.
Then, cross it with frequency
The four collection frequencies do not ask the same thing of a route:
Frequency | How it fits the route |
|---|---|
Daily | Goes into the route every single day, no exceptions. It puts the most pressure on the collector's capacity |
Weekly | A fixed day of the week per client, spread out so they do not all pile up on the same day |
Biweekly | Careful here: it is exactly 15 days, not "every other week" in the sense of "the same weekday." A client who lands on a Tuesday can land on a Wednesday next time. See Frequencies and calendar |
Monthly | The lowest daily pressure, but the easiest to forget if it is not on a visible calendar |
If you mix frequencies in the same route, the daily ones drive the plan: they are the clients who absolutely must be seen today, and everyone else scheduled for that week or month gets fit in around them.
Watch out for weekends
If your loan setup does not collect on Saturdays or Sundays, due dates get pushed forward sequentially: Saturday is checked first, and if Sunday is also off, the instalment ends up falling on Monday. That means your Mondays tend to bunch up more collections than usual (whatever landed on the weekend, pushed forward), and it is better to plan around that than to be surprised by it every week. See the full detail in Frequencies and calendar.
How much a collector can really carry
There is no universal magic number (it depends on distance between clients, mode of transport, whether they collect cash or by transfer), but the right way to estimate it is not "how many can I assign them," it is how much they are actually collecting, today. If a collector has a big book but a low average collected per live loan, they are not squeezing their route, and adding more clients only makes it worse. See Collector performance, specifically the "Avg. / live loan" column, which is the metric built exactly for this question.
An example of how to build the day
Time block | What goes here |
|---|---|
First hour | Daily clients in the farthest zone, so they are not left for the end once fatigue sets in |
Mid-morning | The rest of the daily clients, plus whichever weekly/biweekly/monthly ones fall due today, grouped by proximity |
Last hours | Clients with a specific time window (only afternoons, only after work) and route close-out with margin for surprises |
Always leave margin: a route calculated down to the exact minute breaks the moment the first client is not home, and that margin is exactly what stops one client's delay from contaminating everyone after them.
When to split a route in two
These are the signals that a route no longer fits one collector:
Signal | What it indicates |
|---|---|
The collector consistently finishes the route late | The route has more work than a day allows |
The last clients of the day get shorter, rushed visits | They are making up for lost time earlier, at the cost of collection quality |
Arrears rise among the clients at the end of the route, not the start | It is an operational signal, not a client-risk one: nobody arrives on time, or at all |
The collector reports fatigue or asks for help repeatedly | The load has already crossed the sustainable point |
Splitting a route means bringing in a new collector and reassigning part of the existing book, not starting from zero. See Inviting a collector.
Frequently asked questions
Should I assign fixed routes or let the collector decide the order each day? A fixed base route (the general order, the time blocks) gives consistency and lets you compare performance day to day. Within that base, some daily flexibility (if a client says they are out, skip and continue) is healthy and does not contradict having a planned route.
How do I organise the route if I have clients on several frequencies mixed in the same zone? Always prioritise the daily frequency as the fixed skeleton of the route, and fit the weekly, biweekly and monthly ones due that specific day around it, using proximity within that subset.
What do I do if a new collector does not know the zone well yet? Give them a smaller route than what would "fit" on paper for the first few weeks, and measure their real collection average before expanding it. A small, well-completed route beats a big, half-done one.
Summary
- A good route crosses geographic zone, collection frequency and the collector's real capacity, not a single criterion.
- Daily frequency is the route's fixed skeleton; everything else fits around it based on that week's calendar.
- Mondays tend to bunch up more collections because of the sequential weekend skip: plan for it, do not just endure it every week.
- Measure real capacity with the average collected per live loan, not with how many clients "fit" on paper.
- Split a route when the signals (consistent delay, arrears concentrated at day's end) call for it, not once it is already too late.
Prestafolio shows you each collector's real performance (total collected, loans managed and the average per live loan) so you can split the book with data, not by guesswork: see Collector performance and Inviting a collector.