Short answer

Yes — collapse them down to one routine per distinct day pattern. If you have separate Mon-only, Mon/Wed, and Mon/Wed/Fri routines for the same round, they should merge into a single Mon/Wed routine plus a Friday routine. Fewer routines, cleaner operative day-lists, easier to manage absences.

Detail

Councils often start out with one routine per bin frequency — daily, Mon/Wed/Fri, Mon/Wed, Tue/Thu, Fri-only — and end up with five or six routines all stacked on the same physical round. That's more granular than the recurrence engine needs and more cluttered than the supervisor wants.

The minimum useful set is one routine per distinct day pattern, scoped to the bins that actually run on that pattern. So for a typical Old Town bin round, the consolidated set is usually:

  • Mon/Wed routine — every bin that runs on a Monday or a Wednesday.
  • Friday routine — every bin that runs on a Friday (Mon/Wed/Fri bins are already in the Mon/Wed set, so Friday picks up the additional Friday work).
  • Tue/Thu routine — every bin that runs only on those days.
  • Daily routine (optional) — high-traffic bins that genuinely need every-day emptying, e.g. shop-front bins.

The consolidation principle: pick the underlying day patterns the bins are bucketed against, not the historical-list of "frequencies the council uses". Then put the union of bins for each pattern into a single routine.

What you gain:

  • The operative's day-list on the mobile app is one combined list of bins, not three lists from three routines that all happen to fire today.
  • Absences and reassignments are simpler — reassigning one routine's bins covers everyone who works that day pattern.
  • The routine list is short and scannable; you can see at a glance what's happening on each day pattern.

When NOT to consolidate:

  • Different form template per routine — if the Mon/Wed bins use a different form (e.g. recycling vs general waste), keep them in separate routines.
  • Different priority — if Mon/Wed bins are routine and the Friday route is genuinely a "deep clean" that needs higher priority, the routines should stay separate so the priority isn't averaged.
  • Different assignee group — if Mon/Wed is handled by one crew and Tue/Thu by a different crew, keep them separate even if the day patterns share days.

How to actually consolidate

There are two ways to get from "many overlapping routines" to "one routine per day pattern":

  • Delete and rebuild. Delete the existing routines (with "delete all future occurrences"), then create the new consolidated routines from scratch. The asset register isn't touched — your bins stay put — only the schedule layer is cleared. This is usually the cleanest path when you're also fixing names, end dates, or assignees at the same time.
  • Edit in place. Open each existing routine, change its bin list, rename, and use "update all future occurrences" to propagate. Fine if you're only changing one thing per routine, but tedious if multiple things need fixing on each.

Rule of thumb: if you'd need to touch more than two fields per routine to fix them, delete-and-rebuild is faster.

Watch-outs

  • Operatives don't see "routines" as a concept — they just see the jobs for the day. So consolidation is really about your ability to manage the work, not theirs. Don't over-collapse and lose the ability to differentiate when you need to.
  • The bins-per-routine count is the audit measure — consolidated routines should not lose any bins. If you go from 60 + 60 + 60 bins across three Mon/Wed routines to a single Mon/Wed routine of 60 bins (because of de-duplication), confirm that's correct — bins on multiple patterns should be in every routine that covers them.
  • Naming matters more when you've consolidated — see How should I name routines when I have several covering the same physical area on different days?.