# Delivery routes Plan a letterbox drop — draw a delivery area, let Prenso order every address into a walkable route, adjust it by hand, and print a sheet for your team. A route is a delivery area, the addresses inside it, and the order you walk them. It is the unit you assign to a person, so a good route is one someone can finish in a single outing. If you have run a letterbox drop off a printed street map before, this is the step that replaces it — with the difference that Prenso knows how many addresses are in the area before anyone sets off. ## Creating a route Open [Explore](/docs/workspaces/explore). You get the full country with your workspace's address data behind it and your existing routes drawn on top, so you can see what is already covered before adding to it. ### Draw an area Use the draw tool to trace a polygon around the streets you want. Click to place each corner and close the shape to finish. As soon as an area exists, Prenso counts the addresses inside it and shows the total, so you can adjust before committing. Drawing is the right choice when the boundary is something physical: a river, a railway line, a main road nobody wants to cross with a bag of leaflets, or simply how far someone can walk in an hour. ### Select boundaries Turn on a boundary layer and click the areas you want instead. Prenso merges your selection into a single route and names it after the areas you picked. Selecting is the right choice when you want consistent, repeatable patches. Statistical Area 1 units are small enough to be walkable and are published nationally, so a route built from them lines up with census data and looks the same every time you rebuild it. You can combine up to 20 areas into one route. If you're reaching that, the route is almost certainly too big to walk in one go — split it. > **Good to know** > > Not every boundary layer can be used to create routes. Electorate boundaries, for > example, are there for orientation — you almost never want a single delivery > area covering a whole electorate. Layers that can create routes offer the option > when you select them. See [Map data](/docs/workspaces/map-data) for what each layer contains. ## Sizing an area The address count is the number that matters, and Prenso shows it before you create anything. A rough guide for planning on foot: | Addresses | Roughly | | --------- | -------------------------------------- | | 100–150 | An hour, comfortable for a first-timer | | 200–300 | A solid afternoon | | 400+ | Usually worth splitting in two | Suburban streets with long driveways take much longer per address than a row of townhouses, so treat these as a starting point and adjust to your own patch. ## Generating a route A new route has addresses but no order. Select **Auto-generate** and Prenso builds a walking route. It works the way an experienced deliverer does. Addresses are grouped by street **and by side of the street**, so odd and even numbers are separate runs — you walk up one side and back down the other instead of crossing the road at every house. Each run is kept intact and in house-number order, and Prenso then searches for the order and direction of runs that keeps the total walking distance down. The result appears in the **Route** panel beside the map, as numbered segments you can expand. > Very large areas can't be auto-routed — beyond about a thousand street-side > segments, Prenso asks you to shrink the boundary instead. That is well past > the size anyone can deliver in one go, so hitting it is a sign the route wants > splitting. ## Editing a route Auto-generate gets the geometry right. It doesn't know your patch. In the Route panel you can: * **Reorder segments.** Drag a segment to move it. Use this for a shortcut through a reserve, or to finish nearest to where the car is parked. * **Reorder addresses within a segment.** Drag individual addresses when the numbering doesn't match the walk. * **Remove an address.** Drop a property that has a no-junk sticker, a locked gate, or a dog. * **Delete a segment.** Drop a whole street someone else is covering. Select **Save** to keep your changes. The address count and route length update as you edit, so you always know what you are asking someone to walk. ## Printing Select **Print** and choose a layout: * **Route sheet** — the map, a tick-off list of streets, and a sign-off block. This is the one to hand to a volunteer: they can mark off streets as they go and sign the sheet when they finish. * **Street list** — the map and a plain list of streets, with no checklist. Use it as a reference for someone who already knows the area. Both generate a PDF you can print or email. The sheet includes the address count and total distance, so whoever picks it up knows what they've taken on. An area that runs north–south is printed on its side, so it fills the page instead of sitting in a thin ribbon down the middle. North is therefore not always up on the sheet, which is why every printout carries a north arrow. The compass at the bottom right of the map on screen answers the same question for the map you are working on — and selecting it squares the map back up if you have rotated or tilted it. What is up on screen has no effect on the printout. ## Managing routes **Routes** shows every route in the workspace with its address count and route distance — your inventory of areas, and how much walking each represents. Each row's menu has **Show on map**, which opens Explore focused on that route. For coverage — which areas have been done and which are still out — use a campaign's **Map** tab instead. Routes are permanent; coverage belongs to a particular distribution. See [Campaigns](/docs/workspaces/campaigns). Routes count against your plan's per-workspace limit. Deleting one frees the slot straight away, but also removes it from any campaign it was assigned to, so archive-by-deletion is not a good habit mid-campaign. ## Next steps - [Campaigns and deliveries](/docs/workspaces/campaigns) — Assign routes to people and track coverage. - [Map data](/docs/workspaces/map-data) — The address and boundary layers behind every map.