Deliveries and drivers: pick, load and track every drop

What does the deliveries feature do?

It joins up the three places a delivery goes wrong: the warehouse shelf, the van and the office. Pickers work from a pick wave on a phone, drivers see their stops in order on their own phone, and the office sees every drop in one list with a plain status.

Most delivery mistakes are not driving mistakes. They are a case left on the shelf, a short pick nobody mentioned, or a shop that was closed and nobody wrote down why. EasyTaskr is built around catching those three things early, while there is still time to fix them.

How does picking work before the van leaves?

Each order is picked from a pick wave on the warehouse phone. The picker opens Picking, sees the waves waiting to be picked, and taps Start (or Continue on a wave already begun). Starting a wave moves its order to Picking, so the office can see that someone is on it.

Each line shows where to go, the product, its barcode, how many are required and how many are in stock. The picker scans or types each barcode and the picked count goes up. A wave can only be completed when every item on it has been picked, and completing it moves the order to Packed. That rule matters: if the shelf is short, the wave stays open instead of quietly going out light, and the order cannot be marked delivered while the stock is not there. Someone has to deal with the gap, by finding the stock or changing the order, before the van is loaded.

What does the driver see on the phone?

The driver signs in with a driver code and a 4-digit PIN. The home screen has Start shift, Take break and End shift, an Online or Offline marker, and today's count of drops done and still to go.

Under My deliveries there are three tabs: To do, Done and Failed. Opening a stop shows its progress, the address with an Open in maps link, the order number, the delivery number, how many items, the total and when it is due. A Call button rings the shop, which saves a lot of standing at a locked door.

While a shift is running the phone sends its position. Ending the shift stops that, and saves the finish time and the distance driven. The Shift page shows the driver's own week and month: drops delivered, distance, hours and how many were on time.

What does the office see?

The Logistics screen is headed "Deliveries and drivers for today". It can show deliveries as a list or as a board, and it opens with a Needs you section: drops that failed, and stops with no driver yet. Below that are today's deliveries and the drivers, each driver with their stops in route order.

Every drop has one of four statuses:

Drops can also be flagged as urgent, so a pharmacy top-up or a shop that is about to run out stands out on the board. The screen has a Refresh button to pull the latest position of every drop.

Step by step: a delivery day

1. In the office, open Logistics and use Add driver for anyone new: driver code (for example DRV-001), full name, phone, vehicle type and vehicle number.
2. On the warehouse phone, open Picking, choose the first order's wave and tap Start.
3. Go to the location on each line, scan the barcode for every case, and watch the picked count rise.
4. If the shelf is short, stop and tell the office; the wave stays open until the stock is found or the order is edited.
5. When every line is picked, complete the wave; the order moves to Packed and the cases go on the van.
6. The driver opens the driver app, signs in with the code and PIN, and taps Start shift.
7. In the office, open each drop and press Send out now; it moves to On the road.
8. The driver works down To do, using Open in maps for directions and Call if the shop needs warning.
9. When the driver reports a drop done, the office opens it and presses Mark delivered.
10. If a drop fails, the office chooses Could not deliver, types what went wrong and saves it as not delivered.
11. At the end of the run the driver taps End shift, which stops location sharing and records the distance.
12. Check Needs you before closing up, so no failed drop is left until tomorrow.

How should I plan the order of stops?

The route planner sits under Transport. You can plan shops near one town or between two, then choose Best order to let it work out the sequence or Keep my order if you know the roads better. A route takes up to 24 stops, and up to 10 can be opened in Google Maps in one go. If the map service does not answer, distances and times are estimated and marked "approx", so nobody mistakes a guess for a measurement.

A worked example: a van has eight drops. Driven in the order the orders came in, the run is 74 km. In the suggested order it is 51 km. At 12 litres per 100 km that saves about 2.8 litres a run, or roughly 14 litres over a five-day week, before counting the driver's time. Numbers like these are only a sample; your own roads decide the real saving.

Why does the office mark deliveries done, not the driver?

Because "delivered" is a promise to the customer and to your accounts. A tap on a phone in a hurry, in the rain, is easy to get wrong. Keeping the final mark in the office means one person checks it, the order status updates once, and a dispute about a missing case starts from a clear record. The driver's job is to drive, find the shop and call if something is wrong.

What should I set up before the first run?

Add every driver with a working phone number, and make sure products have barcodes so picking can be done by scanning rather than reading labels. Agree a rule for failed drops: who calls the customer, and by when. If you sell on account, read our guide on customer credit for wholesalers, because a delivery to a shop that is over its limit is a debt you have chosen to grow. For running vans that also sell from the back, see van sales and route orders.

What does it not do yet?

To keep this page honest: the driver app does not take a signature or a photo at the door, it does not record cash collected, and the office list is refreshed with a button rather than updating on its own. Plan your paperwork around that, for example by keeping signed delivery notes for high-value drops.