Dispatched

In real life, 80% of the time dispatching an order is simple: one dispatch, all items. The final remaining 20% of the time can get really messy: multiple dispatches with different items in each dispatch, spread across an extended timeframe. Pakk allows you to capture both of these scanarios and anything in between with relative ease.

A 'Simple' Scenario

• Consider an order that came through one of your Pakk webstores

• Everything was in stock, so it was all committed at the same time the order was placed

• As it came from the web and was for an individual without a tax reference number, it was cash saled and paid in the same moment

• So, the current status of the order is Committed | Cash Sale | Paid

• In other words, the order is just pending dispatch

• Since everything is committed, everything can be dispatched in one go

Creating Dispatches Manually

In the above scenario, you would create a single dispatch for the order, on a specified date, with a specified courier and with an optional tracking number. You could create this dispatch manually (as you can do with everything in the Pakk admin panel), by creating a new 'dispatch' inside the order and adding the lines corresponding to the committed order lines.

However, that's a bit tedious and error prone (although the system won't allow you to dispatch stock that isn't on the original order, or uncommitted) and most of the time you'll only want to do manual dispatches for the small number of orders where different parts of the order are dispatched separately (perhaps on different days or with different couriers, or both).

Most of the time, you'll probably want to use the intelligent autodispatch function, which is a bit like the autocommit function we discussed earlier.

Automatic / Intelligent Dispatch

The system makes it easy to dispatch whole orders at once. You can use the Dispatch action directly from an order drilldown page, or you can dispatch multiple orders at once from the list view. In both cases, you can provide a dispatch date, carrier and separate tracking number for each order.

Automatic dispatch takes into account:

• Whether a product is dispatchable or not (obviously it won't dispatch a service for example).

• Whether a stockable product has been committed (it won't dispatch uncommitted stock).

• If a product is non stockable - in which case it will just dispatch the whole line quantity (because no committment is needed).

• In all cases, the quantity already dispatched

Workflow Tip You can use the autodispatcher several times on the same order, perhaps letting it do most of the work for the first (main) dispatch, then going in and manually removing a few lines that weren't dispatched first time round, then going back the next day and running the autodispatcher again to dispatch the remainder of the order.

Just like with autocommittment, don't be scared to rerun the autodispatcher - it knows what has already been dispatched and won't create a mess!

Order Dispatched Status

The overall dispatched status is derived from the dispatches on an order, and the individual dispatch lines on those dispatches. Only once everything that can be dispatched is actually dispatched, the order will show as Fully Dispatched - up until that point it will be Partially Dispatched if anything has been sent out, or Not Dispatched (not actually shown) if nothing has been sent.

As a visual aid, each line on the order shows the quantity dispatched as well as the quantity remaining to be dispatched, so you can quickly work out what is remaining on orders that are not fully dispatched.

Remember Non despatchable items types, like services for example, will always show 0 as both qty to dispatch and qty remaining to be dispatched.