Accurate geolocations are a requirement for the appropriate inclusion of an address in the portatour® schedule. In the process of geocoding, the address is checked and localized as accurately as possible on the map. The longitude and latitude are then stored internally in WGS84 standard.
The addresses are automatically geocoded when importing customer and appointment data to portatour®. Depending on the quality of the addresses, there may arise some problems with individual addresses.
If you click Geocoding in the main menu you will receive a list of customers or appointments for whom the geocoding of the address has failed (section Not geocoded), or for whom the geolocation is inaccurate (section With Warning). At the top of the page you see a summary of the successfully and exactly geocoded customers and appointments.
Customers or appointments without geo-location should be edited immediately as they cannot be scheduled by portatour® without geocoding. In such cases, the navigation menu and the Geocoding menu item will be displayed in red. Inaccurate geo-positions, however, are not critical. The quality of calculated schedules may only be affected in case of major deviations of the geo-location – e.g. if the street name of a customer in a major city is missing. The reason of the warning is shown directly in the list, underneath you see the date of the automatic geocoding. The list is sorted by warnings so you can see addresses with similar problems directly underneath each other.
Click a line to open a menu. Click Edit address to further edit the address. Click Remove warning if the deviation of the geocoding is small and acceptable to you. Click Open to display the respective customer's detail page.
When editing the address, an input mask is opened with the address that portatour® has used for geocoding and displaying the customer on the map. Error or warning messages are shown in red:
Instructions on the messages and on how to further edit the address and geocoding can be found at Geocode address.
In order to once again geocode all addresses of the list with geocoding errors click the Geocode problematic addresses again button below the list. The process can last some time and is carried out in the background, i.e. you can continue to work with portatour® in the meantime. As the portatour® map material is updated several times per year we recommend to geocode problematic addresses again every year. Thus, possible problems might disappear.