Time windows and plan status
How Transportial decides whether a stop or trip is on time: hard and soft windows, tolerances, anchors and opening hours, and where you see it.
Updated 13 October 2026
Every stop and every trip has one plan status that says whether it runs on time: OK, Too late or Too early. Transportial calculates it from the time the vehicle is expected at the stop and all time constraints on that stop, and recalculates it whenever the trip's times change.
What the plan status checks
- The start and end of the stop's time window: not before and not after.
- When a stop has several time windows, the window that fits best.
- Soft windows, with their own tolerance (see below).
- An anchored arrival time, if the stop has one. See Plan stop durations and anchor arrival times.
- The opening hours of the stop and its location, but only when your administrator has switched on Opening hours count for the plan status. By default opening hours are not judged.
A stop that has been carried out is judged on its actual start; other stops on their ETA. A trip shows the status of its first stop that is not done yet, based on the vehicle's live ETA, and stays Too late as long as any remaining stop is too late. A stop that was reached late keeps Too late, also when the rest of the trip catches up. A cancelled trip has no plan status.
Hard and soft time windows
| Window type | When the stop is too early or too late |
|---|---|
| Hard window (the default) | When it is outside the window by more than the hard window tolerance: 5 minutes unless your administrator changed it. The same tolerance applies to an anchored arrival time. |
| Soft window | A preference. Only when it is outside the window by more than the soft tolerance: 30 minutes early and 30 minutes late unless your administrator changed it, possibly per action type. |
To make a stop's window soft:
- Open the trip or transport order and click Edit (✎).
- Find the stop and fill in its Time window.
- Under Window type (hard by default), choose Soft window.
- Click Save.
Where you see the plan status
| Where | What you see |
|---|---|
| Plan board | The bar at the left of a row: green OK, red Too late, blue Too early. Purple stands for Off route and yellow for no trip. |
| Planner | A trip that is too late or too early gets a red or blue border and a small ! next to its name. In the strip inside the bar, a late stop has a red ring and an early stop a blue ring. |
| Hover card on the planner | The plan status of the trip and, per stop, the reasons, such as Late 25 min (hard window), Early 10 min (soft window) or Anchor missed by 15 min. The same reasons appear when you hover a stop in the strip. |
| Trip panel | Plan status on the Information tab, and on each stop card a Too late or Too early tag with the reasons. |
| Watchtower | A dot with the plan status of the consignment's latest trip. |
Whether the vehicle has left its planned route is shown separately, as the route status On route or Off route.
With the Exceptions feature, a stop that is Too late raises the exception Time window at risk. See Handle planning exceptions.
For administrators: set the tolerances
- Open the side menu (☰) and choose Settings.
- Click the Environment tab and open the Planning section.
- Go to Time windows and stop timing.
- Set Hard window tolerance (minutes): how far a stop may be outside a hard window or past its anchor before it counts. The default is 5; 0 means exact.
- Set Soft window tolerance, early (minutes) and Soft window tolerance, late (minutes). Both are 30 by default.
- Optionally, under Soft window tolerance per action type, click Add action type, choose the type (for example Loading) and enter Early (minutes) and Late (minutes). A stop uses the type of its first action.
- Switch Opening hours count for the plan status on if stops outside opening hours should be too early or too late. Enforced opening hours then count like hard windows, preferred ones with the soft tolerance.
- Choose how Soft windows in route optimisation are sent to optimisers that only know hard windows (PTV xTour and PTV OptiFlow): Widen by the tolerance (the default), Ignore soft windows or Treat as hard windows.
- Click Save.
Leave a field empty to use the default. The same tolerances and opening-hours switch are used by the time check in nearby orders.