Assigning the Sort Order for Delivery Manifests

Planning to Use Delivery Manifests

After you assign customer routes, you can assign a sort order for each customer. This sort order indicates the customer's place on a route, in comparison to other customers on the same route. Sort orders are assigned by specifying a 4-digit, left-justified code in the Sort Order box in the Customer Buyers/Manifest tab.

When assigning sort numbers, you should begin with an unusually high number, using all four digits. This allows plenty of room to add sorts ahead of the first code used (1050, 1000 and so on). In addition, you should assign the sort numbers in multiples of 50. This way, you can easily insert new customers to a route without changing everyone’s sort number.

Since the Sort Order field is left-justified, manifests are sorted by route in numeric sequence, beginning with the left-most characters. Suppose you create a manifest with three pick tickets. Each ticket has its own sort code: 1000, 2000, and 3000. Therefore, they would sort in the following way:

1000

2000

3000

When you assign sort numbers to each customer on a route, the invoices on a shipping manifest can be sorted automatically.

How To Determine Customer Sort Orders

Before you can assign a sort order to each customer, you must determine the order in which each customer receives delivery. This can be done by printing a customer report and manually specifying the sort order, or by printing a delivery manifest based on your active accounts and automatically updating the sort number through the Delivery Manifest application. Both methods are described below.

Printing a customer report

Print a Customer Master Listing, sorting by customer within a route, with a page break before each customer. For instructions, see Printing the Customer Master Listing Report (Standard) and Printing the Customer Master Listing Report (Custom).

To determine the order in which each customer receives delivery, go through each page of the customer report with your driver(s) and decide which customer receives deliveries first, second, third, and so on. Arrange each page in the order of delivery, going from first to last.

Next, number each customer with the intended sort number. For example, you might assign the first customer a sort number of 110000, the second customer 110050, the third customer 110100, and so on.

When you finish, you can manually enter the sort number for each customer in the Sort Order box in the Customer Buyers/Manifest tab.

Printing a manifest

Create a manifest through the (TS) screen based on a merged journal of the last three months. This should include most of the customers to whom you made deliveries during the last three months. These are your active accounts.

Note: Before you print the manifest, you must specify the SQL reporting formats in the Route Parameters window.

Note: If you made deliveries to a customer thirty times within the last three months, that customer is listed thirty times in consecutive order.

Give the manifests to your driver(s) to rank each stop in the order it should be delivered, by numbering each stop from first to last.

Next, number each customer with the intended sort number. For example, assign the first customer 110000, the second customer 110050, the third customer 110100, and so on. To assign sort numbers, see Changing Shipping Manifests.

Now, you are ready to create delivery manifests.