Local Delivery Orders
With the Local Delivery add-on, an order can go out on one of your own delivery routes instead of shipping as a parcel. This article covers putting orders on routes, scheduling them, and what they cost. Setting up zones, windows and fees is in Local delivery settings.
How an order becomes a local delivery
Three ways:
- Your channel settings. A channel set to All in-zone orders puts every order to an address in your delivery area on a route automatically. See Which orders go on routes.
- You choose it when creating the order. Tick Local delivery on the New Order dialog. The fee then comes from your delivery rules, so the delivery fee field disappears.
- You change it on the order. The Delivery card on the order screen has Deliver locally, and Ship as a parcel instead to go the other way.
The card says why an order is on a route: because of the channel setting, because the customer chose it, or because your team did.
Window or date
Once an order is going on a route, the kind of customer decides what it's scheduled into:
| Default | Arrives | |
|---|---|---|
| Retail (and orders with no customer) | A window: a date and a time slot, like Thursday 2–6pm | During the window |
| Wholesale | A date only, like Friday | During the account's receiving hours, if set |
Both defaults are in Settings → Local delivery → Scheduling. A wholesale account can have its own setting under Delivery timing on the customer record, for the one account that needs a window when the rest don't.
A date-only delivery doesn't use up a window's places. How many you can deliver that day depends on your vehicles and drivers.
How the date or window gets picked
When an order goes on a route, Iraca fills in the schedule for you:
- A wholesale account with standing delivery days gets its next standing day that's still before your order cutoff. Set standing days on the customer record (for example, Tuesdays and Fridays). The cutoff is in Settings → Local delivery → Scheduling: 10 hours means "orders by 2pm the day before".
- Everyone else gets the next open window in their zone, or the next delivery day the zone has windows on.
- If nothing is open, the order is marked Needs scheduling so it doesn't get lost. Pick a date by hand on the Delivery card.
You can always change it: pick another window from the list, choose another suggested day, or set any date by hand.
The delivery fee
While the order is a draft, the fee follows your delivery fee rules and updates as you change the lines or the address. The Delivery card says where it came from ("your standard fee", "zone fee", "this account's terms", or "free delivery: order is over the threshold") and how much more the order needs for free delivery.
- Override fee sets a different amount, or 0 to waive it. The fee then stays as you set it, whatever changes, and the override is recorded in the order's activity. Use delivery rules undoes it.
- Confirming the order locks the fee, like the sales tax. A later change to your fee rules never changes a confirmed order.
The minimum order
If the order is below the minimum order for local delivery, Confirm refuses it and says how much it's short. You can still deliver it: tick Deliver it anyway and give a reason. The reason is saved in the order's activity.
The minimum only applies to local deliveries. An order that ships as a parcel isn't affected.
Staying out of the shipping flow
A local-delivery order goes on the van, not in a parcel, so:
- It never appears on a pick list.
- Buy labels, Split shipment and Mark as shipped aren't offered for it, and the fulfillment tablet's ship screens don't list it. To ship it as a parcel after all, choose Ship as a parcel instead first.
On the orders list, local deliveries carry a Delivery badge with their date or window, and the Delivery filter shows only local deliveries, or only parcels.
What the driver needs
On the customer record, the Receiving section holds the hours the address can take a delivery, delivery instructions (a dock door or gate code), and whether a signature is required. These show on the order's Delivery card.
It also has Time per stop: how many minutes a delivery to this customer usually takes, if it's not your normal time. Use it for a loading dock with a wait, a building with stairs, or an account that takes several cases at once. Route planning leaves that much time at the stop before the van moves on. Leave it blank and the stop gets your usual time.
Putting orders on routes
Once orders are scheduled, you build routes, send the vans out and record each delivery on the dispatch board.