🚛 The Importance of Deliveries
Hey there! We have a very exciting announcement that I’m sure will please many of you. Scheduled Deliveries are en route, with an estimated arrival time of Tuesday, September 1st. We’ve received multiple requests on the idea board about this, and we’ve heard you.
Getting every aspect of deliveries up and running is a mammoth task. So, in the spirit of Rundoo’s “Now” culture, we are launching this in stages, with a tentative rollout for the full Deliveries functionality by September 30th!
In this week’s primer, I will take you through this very first stage.
📍 At a Glance
Here is a quick glance card for how to Schedule a Delivery:
Mark as Delivery: In transactions, you now see an option to “Schedule Delivery”. Clicking this allows you to mark a transaction for delivery. OR add this order to an existing scheduled delivery (pretty nifty!)
Schedule Delivery: In POS, under Transactions you will see a Deliveries tab. Here you will see all transactions marked for delivery, like a to-do list for the person responsible for organizing deliveries at your store. Click the transaction you want to add to a delivery, then fill in the relevant details and click “Schedule Delivery”.
See Scheduled Deliveries: Staying in the Deliveries tab, you will be able to see all the scheduled deliveries and their corresponding orders. You can choose to view this as a calendar or as a list.
Add a driver: This happens in the admin tab, under staff. Your drivers are staff members. If your drivers do not need access to your counter, you can just activate them here without enabling any permissions.
📦 The Complete Workflow for Scheduled Deliveries
Scheduled deliveries, in a nutshell, allow you to mark transactions for delivery so you can group them into a single, organized calendar. You can do this in a new transaction, a will call, or even a completed transaction. Each scheduled delivery will appear on a calendar so that you can see what is due to go out and on which day.
Most stores handle scheduled deliveries in a similar way:
Cashiers mark transactions for delivery as they are being rung up.
The Scheduler - whether that is a logistics manager or a store manager or another team member - organizes these deliveries by assigning a driver, selecting a delivery date, and grouping multiple transactions into a single run.
So this is exactly how we built it in Rundoo.
📅 How Does it Work?
When a customer comes to the counter and says, ‘I want to purchase all of this lumber, and I want it to be delivered to a site by Thursday,’ the cashier can ring up the sale as normal and then mark it for delivery by clicking the “Schedule delivery” button.
A window will open up and you can fill in the details.
Deliver by date: As the name suggests, this is not the delivery date, but the date the customer wants the items to arrive by.
Address: Where the delivery should arrive, likely the address of the job site.
Special Instructions: Anything that we should know about the delivery (optional)
Once that is done, click “Mark for delivery” and finish the sale as normal. The cashier’s job is all complete.
Throughout the day, any other transactions that need to be marked for delivery can be, whether they are Will Calls, Completed Transactions, or even Online Orders (more on that below). That is all that happens in the transactions tab. Now for the logistics!
Find the Deliveries tab, under Transactions. When you click on this, you can see a few things:
A calendar showing scheduled deliveries
A window on the right called “To Schedule”
Let’s start on the right. Everything in “To Schedule” is basically the to-do list for the Scheduler. This list shows every transaction marked for delivery that has not been added to a delivery yet.
To set these up, the Scheduler can select the transactions they want to add to a delivery from the list on the right. Click “Add to Delivery” at the bottom and a window will pop up. The only required information here is the departure date, the other fields are all optional.
🧾How do I see what’s included in each delivery?
On the calendar view, or in the list view, find the delivery by searching by departure date, customer, or driver. Click on the delivery in question to see the list of transactions that are on this delivery. By clicking on the green transaction ID, the full transaction will open up.
➕ Adding Transactions to an Existing Delivery
The next interesting part here is, say I have a delivery scheduled for Oliver on September 10th. Then Oliver pops into the store and says, “Hey, I actually need more items added to that delivery. It’s to the same house and I need them arriving at the same time.” This process works slightly differently to the one above, and there are two ways you can handle it.
Option 1: Mark it for Delivery
In the case where the cashier doesn’t edit existing deliveries, then they would mark a transaction for delivery as detailed above. The Scheduler then finds the delivery in the calendar, or through the list. (You can filter by customer, by departure date, by driver.) Open it up and search for the transaction you want to add to it.
Note: when you click in the “Search transactions” bar, any transaction not yet added to a delivery will pop up for you to select.
Option 2: Add it as you create the transaction
When you click on Schedule delivery in the transaction, there is an option in the bottom right-hand corner that says “Attach to existing delivery”. When you check that, a list of all of the scheduled deliveries will pop up below. Select the delivery you want to add this to and click “Attach to delivery”.
Either way works, but the flexibility allows you to customize this for how you want this to work in your store.
The Finer Details
🗺️How do I track the deliveries?
Currently, deliveries use a simple tracking system. In the calendar, you will see different colors on the orders to denote their current status. You can update a delivery's status by opening it and clicking the correct option.
👥 Who are the drivers?
Great question! The list of drivers comes straight from your staff list in the Admin tab. If the drivers you use are already set up in Rundoo, then you don’t need to do anything. To add drivers, go into the Admin tab, select Staff, and add them in the same way you would any new staff member. If they do not use your POS at all, you can just add their name and either email or phone number, and leave all permissions unchecked. That way, they won’t have access to anything at the counter, but they can be associated with deliveries.
💻 Will Call, Completed Transactions & Online Orders
I have walked through different scenarios focusing on New Transactions, but this functionality is also built for Will Calls and Completed sales. It uses the exact same set-up, just starting from a different tab.
Some of you might be asking if online orders can be routed to delivery. Technically, yes! However, customers cannot set these details themselves. They need to take additional steps to make this happen.
First, the customer creates an online order. Then they ring up the store (or pop in) and say, “Hey, I’ve made an online order, and I want you to schedule it for delivery.” Following the same steps above, a staff member would mark the transaction for delivery. The only difference is that they will start in the Online Orders tab.
👀 The Customer Experience
That’s everything from your side. Now from the customer side, they will get an email to confirm that the item(s) are scheduled for delivery. They’ll also get an email notification for when the item is delivered so they are aware and can check on the delivery to ensure everything looks correct on their end.
Otherwise, the process is the same as always - quick and easy!
Resources
📇 Printable glance card can be found here
🗺️ A printable walkthrough guide can be found here
🎥 Video demo can be seen here
🤝 Just the Beginning
As I said up top, this is the first stage for deliveries, and we’re really excited to see what you think about it. We will update you as the next stages of deliveries roll out in the coming weeks.
Huge thanks to Umer and Seb for building out Scheduled Deliveries. 🙌
Once again, this was a request from real store owners that is now coming to life in Rundoo. If you have an idea or a request, add it here 💡 so that we can start mulling it over and continue making Rundoo work for you.
Talk soon,
Dee
Ok thanks Dee, I will take a look.
Sicje I got you on the chat. I was thinking how do we mass price updates? Is their someone I can talk to about if this is even possible
Dee,
I think your suggestions are worth a try once we see how it works. What you wrote my work for what we are trying to do. If not I can send another message to add more details of what I see might be an improvement.
One more question: do you think by the end of September online scheduling will be working ?
John