portatour® is now aware of current road closures and automatically takes them into account when calculating schedules. As such, necessary detours are taken into consideration when planning driving times. There is no need to change any settings in portatour®.

To display current road closures, proceed as follows:

• Open the map.
• In the top right corner, click the cogwheel icon.
• Set the “Traffic” selection box to “Traffic: Road closures only”.

Road closures are displayed in black and marked with the following symbol:

Zoom in on the map to see closures on smaller roads.

portatour® updates the road closures once a week, usually on Saturdays. When doing so, portatour® also loads and takes into account future road closures expected for the coming week. This is helpful since as a user, your schedules are calculated into the future.

For several years now, portatour® has been using historical speed data for the calculation of driving times. This data is collected by navigation systems and mobile phone providers by measuring the movement data of millions of road users and is provided for respective road sections. Road sections where the traffic flow data often shows congestion or slow traffic are either avoided or planned with longer travel times when calculating schedules. Traffic flow data is updated in portatour® on a quarterly basis.

What’s new with this update is that you can now display the affected street segments as follows:

• Open the map.
• In the top right corner, click the cogwheel icon.
• Set the “Traffic” selection box to “Traffic: Typical for work days”.

Roads that are shown in red have a high probability of congestion on work days and are therefore evaluated judiciously when planning travel times.

Reminder: In the Options under “Driving Speed” you can further influence driving time. More about this in the online help.

Shortly before Christmas we published a minor update for portatour®. Below you will find a description of the new features.

Map: More colors for displaying customers

It was already possible to color customers on the map not only according to urgency, but also according to other criteria, e.g. industry.

As a reminder, here’s how to proceed:

• In the main menu, click Customers.
• Click the map icon.
• In the top right corner, click the cogwheel icon.
• In the color selection box, select the desired criterion according to which you want to set the colors.

The assignment of colors to the different crtieria occurs automatically, whereby the limit was previously 5 colors. With this update, the color palette has now been extended to 20 colors. Here is an example:

Map: Hide customers by color

Regardless of which criterion you used to color the customers on the map, you can now hide or show all customers of the same color with a single click.

This is useful if you want to focus on individual colors on the map and avoid them being concealed by others.

Proceed as follows:

• If the legend with the color overview is not yet open, click the legend icon at the bottom right.
• To hide or show the customers of a certain color, click the eye icon to the right. The icon toggles between gray and blue.
• To hide or show all customers, use the eye icon in the all row.

Edit customer reference of appointments and tasks

To edit the customer reference of an appointment or task retroactively, open the edit window. The current customer reference is displayed at the top.

Click the pencil icon to create, change or delete a customer reference. When changing the customer reference, the subject and address of the appointment can also be updated, if desired.

Typical use cases:

• The appointment was imported and does not have a customer reference yet.
• The appointment was mistakenly assigned to the wrong customer when it was created.

Note: If portatour® is connected to data sources in Salesforce, Dynamics CRM or Veeva CRM, the customer reference cannot be edited retroactively. Make the change in the source system or delete the appointment and recreate it with the correct customer reference.

New filters in the extended customer search

The following filters have been added to the extended customer search:

• Call block: not blocked today
• In “My Places”: any| no | yes
• Accommodation : any | no | yes

Now, during the Corona pandemic, many representatives have encountered some customers who may not be visited in person, whereby contact is only possible by telephone.

Such telephone calls are a forced substitute for a visit. The call interval should be reset upon conclusion. To log this in portatour® there is a new menu item By phone instead of in person, when you click New report on the customer detail page.

Now what are the differences compared to the normal call report? The report is of type “Other” with the subject “By phone instead of in person”. In addition, this report does not affect the departure point if the schedule is subsequently updated.

Analogous to the normal call report, the date of the last visit is updated for the customer, i.e. the call interval is reset. This telephone call has taken place in lieu of an in-person visit.

Here is a table summarizing the characteristics of the different reports:

Note: Which menu items are actually visible depends on the settings in the Options under “Reporting”.