Dispatch Planning looks across every sales order with goods still to send and lets you build the day’s dispatches from one screen — rather than opening each order in turn and hoping you notice that two of them go to the same customer.

Where to find it: Dispatch Planning in the Inventory section of the main menu.

What the screen shows

Every order line that can actually be sent: goods lines with quantity still outstanding. Charge and discount lines never appear, because there is nothing to put on a vehicle.

Select the lines you intend to send, adjust quantities where you are sending part of a line, and build.

How selections are grouped

Selected lines are grouped by customer and site, and one dispatch is created per group.

So selecting lines from three orders for the same customer produces one dispatch covering all three — one vehicle, one delivery, one set of paperwork. Select lines for three different customers and you get three dispatches.

A group with nothing dispatchable produces no dispatch at all. If everything you selected for a customer turns out to be already fulfilled, no empty record is created for you to tidy up later.

Adding to an existing dispatch

Where a dispatch is already open for a customer, you can append the selected lines to it instead of creating another. That is the difference between one delivery and two.

The same choice appears when you use Create Dispatch from a single sales order: if the customer already has an open dispatch, you are asked whether to add to it or start a new one. Where nothing is open, one is created without asking.

After building

The dispatches created are listed so you can go straight into them. From there the normal flow applies — assign batches, mark dispatched, post to inventory.

Things to know

  • Partial quantities are allowed. Send what you have; the remainder stays outstanding on the order.
  • Kit lines can be selected like any other goods line — they explode into components when the dispatch is marked dispatched.
  • Grouping is by customer and site. The same customer served from two sites gets a dispatch from each, because the goods leave from different places.