Managing your own deliveries
From the Sales Order module, you can view and manage your order deliveries and allocate Resources to shipments – this will be for shipments you are using your own Resources for (e.g. cars/trucks/bikes etc.) and are not outsourcing the shipment to a freight company.
At present you can only manage your own deliveries via the Sales Order module and not from any of the shipment modules e.g. Outbound Shipments.
This guide will explain how to set up your system to use Sales Orders to manage your own deliveries.
If you haven’t yet set up any delivery Resources, you can find out how to do this in Managing Freight & Shipping.
To enable management of your deliveries in the Sales Order module, you will need to configure the following settings in the Delivery Options area of Admin>General:
- Show Sales Orders on Calendar – ensure this box is ticked so that you can view deliveries in Calendar View within the Sales Order module.
- Show Delivery Time – ensure this box is ticked so that the time allocated to each delivery is shown as a calendar appointment.
- Default Delivery Duration – this field is in HH:MM format and allows you to select a period of time that will apply as default for each delivery. You can change the duration from the default option when you are working with Sales Orders.
To manage your deliveries in Sales Orders, you must have:
- Added the appropriate dates and times to the Sales Order fields Delivery Date, Delivery Time and Delivery Duration (HH:MM format).
- Correctly assigned your Resources to the Sales Order i.e. in the Delivery Assigned To field you must choose a Resource (e.g. car or truck) that will deliver the order.
The information you input into these fields will then feed through to Sales Orders in Calendar View.
When in List View, you can add these fields as columns in your view or add a new Filter or Layout to allow you to view and sort these field values.
If you want to assign deliveries to specific people in your team, you can do this using the Assigned To field (e.g. this could be the driver/rider that will be in charge of using your Resource to deliver the order).
You can view all your deliveries from Calendar View in Sales Orders. To access this view, click on the Calendar icon above the toolbar.
You will then need to go and select the calendars for the Resources and/or Users you want to view – which calendar a delivery will show in is determined by the choices made in the Assigned To (i.e. a CRM User) and Delivery Assigned To (i.e. a Resource) fields in a Sales Order.
If you don’t see any of your Resources here, you may not have enabled the ‘show on calendar’ setting for your Resources and Resource Groups when you set them up – you will need to enable this first.
You can adjust the timeframe for your view – the example below uses the Work Week option and shows deliveries for the selected Resources within this timeframe. When in Calendar View, you can also:
- Hover over a calendar event to reveal further information about the delivery.
- Drag an event on the calendar to reschedule the delivery to a different time, date or Resource.
The placement of each calendar event is determined by the fields Delivery Date (what day the event is on), Delivery Time (what time the delivery will start) and Delivery Duration (how long the delivery will take, starting from the Delivery Time field value) and which Resource has been selected.
You can print a Delivery Run sheet from the Sales Order module by clicking on Delivery Run beneath the toolbar.
A new window will open where you can specify the Resource and Delivery Date and then click Submit to generate a run sheet. You can also save, print or search within the run sheet using the options on the toolbar.
Some of the Sales Order fields work with, and are automatically updated by actions in the Outbound Shipments module – because managing your own deliveries sits outside of this system relationship, to mark your Sales Order deliveries as complete, you will need to update the Status field to either Sent or Completed.