Which serves should an independent process server take today?

Ten serves, one server: which should you take today?

Taking serves in the order they were assigned, or the biggest fee first, fills the day with the wrong work. Paste the queue — price, materials, minutes on site, the window each customer gives you and where they are — and get the exact set and order of jobs with the highest profit for the day, the drive and idle time it implies, what each job it turns down would need to pay, and what first-come dispatch leaves behind.

For independent process servers and small serving agencies running one vehicle. Nothing is uploaded: the text box is analysed in this browser and never leaves your device.

1. Paste the queue

One row per job: name, price, materials cost, service minutes, window opens, latest start, miles east of the depot, miles north, optional note (up to 14 jobs)

You start at Back by Your time and vehicle cost per hour ($) Cost per mile ($) Average speed (mph) Road miles per straight-line mile

2. The day

Route

#	Job	Arrive	Wait (min)	Start	Finish	Miles driven	Margin after drive

Jobs turned down

Job	Why	Quoted price	Worth taking at

Against simple rules

Rule	Jobs	Day profit

Prefer a CLI?

Same logic, zero dependencies, one command — reads a file or stdin:

node cli.mjs plan jobs.csv --start 08:00 --end 17:00 --hourly 35 --per-mile 0.70 --json
cat jobs.csv | node cli.mjs plan - --speed 25

Get cli.mjs and engine.mjs — Node 18+, nothing to install, no network serve. More: Which serves should a process server take today? Window and drive-time math.

What's recognised

Input	Handling

The plan is exact for the numbers you type (a search over every set and order, up to 14 jobs). One vehicle and one depot; real traffic, one-way streets, a second server, jobs that must follow each other, customer cancellations and the value of a repeat customer are not modelled. Distance is straight-line miles times your circuity factor, not a routing service.

Common questions

Does it upload my job list?

No. The browser page works on the text you paste, in your own browser, and never sends it anywhere. The CLI reads a local file or stdin and makes no network serve.

How is the best day found?

The tool tries the jobs as a search over which have been done and which was last, keeping every way to get there that is not both later and less profitable than another. That finds the exact best set and order for the numbers you give, and the tests compare it with trying every ordering of every subset.

Why would it turn down a job I would normally take?

Because a server can only be in one place. A job that pays well but drives you across the map, or sits in a window that collides with two better jobs, can cost more than the two it displaces. The tool says what the job would need to pay to earn its place.

Where do the costs come from?

From your own books: fuel and wear per mile, and the hourly cost of you and the you. They are your estimates, so treat the plan as a decision aid, not a forecast.

Who is it for?

Independent process servers and one-vehicle serving agencies choosing which assigned serves to attempt today.