Courier company · Orders

Assignment and order statuses

Assigning orders to couriers, returning them to the pool, what each order status means and which notifications customers receive.

Every order passes through a set of statuses from creation to delivery. This article explains what the statuses mean, how jobs are assigned to couriers and when customers are notified.

Statuses

Status	Meaning
Awaiting approval	An order created in the portal by a customer that requires approval (a partner); it cannot be assigned until you approve it.
In pool	The order has been created but not yet assigned to a courier.
With courier	Assigned to a courier; the parcel has not been collected yet.
Picked up	The courier has collected the parcel and is on the way.
Returning	In a round-trip job the first leg has been delivered and the courier is on the way back.
Delivered	The job is complete.
Cancelled	The order was cancelled, or an order awaiting approval was rejected.
Delivery failed	The courier could not deliver to the recipient (the reason is recorded). The job stays with the courier; it is retried or returned to the sender. See Failed delivery and returns.
Returning to sender	The courier is taking the parcel back to the sender.
Returned to sender	The parcel was handed back to the sender; the job is complete (the courier is paid as usual).
At hub	The shipment is waiting at a hub (transfer centre); no courier holds it. See Hubs and transfer centres.
In transfer	The shipment is going to another hub of the same branch.

Step by step: assigning to a courier

On the order detail page, click Assign to courier (if the job is already with a courier, the button reads Assign to another courier).
Select the courier and click Assign. Only couriers on shift are listed, together with their work status.
To take the job back from the courier, click Return to pool.

A courier with an expired document shows a Document expired label; you can still assign the job. See Courier documents.

To assign many orders at once, use the bulk action on the Orders list; see Order list.

Courier suggestions

At the top of the Assign to courier window, the three best couriers for the order are suggested with a score from 0 to 100. The score combines:

Proximity: straight-line distance from the courier's last location to the centre of the pickup district.
Workload: couriers with no jobs come first.
Direction: a courier whose next stop for a current job is in the pickup district (or the same region) comes first.
Recipient rating: when recipient rating is on, a courier rated above the company average moves slightly ahead and one below moves slightly back (a small factor); see Recipient rating.

Clicking a suggestion selects that courier; nothing is assigned until you click Assign. Suggestions are only an aid and do not affect prices or courier earnings. The list refreshes by itself as courier locations change.

District centres are learned nightly from couriers' locations at the moment they pick up or deliver in that district. For a district whose centre is not known yet, workload and direction are used instead of distance. To change the weights, turn suggestions off or mark a district centre on the map, open Couriers › Courier suggestions (requires the Settings permission).

Auto-assignment

If you turn on Auto-assignment under Couriers › Courier suggestions (off by default), every 30 seconds pool orders are assigned to the highest-scoring courier automatically, and an "Auto-assignment · score …" note is added to the order history.

Only orders whose pickup time is near (30 minutes by default) and that have never been assigned are handled. Orders you returned to the pool are not auto-assigned.
Couriers scoring below the Minimum score (60 by default) are skipped; a courier with an unknown location cannot reach it.
Couriers who already have Max jobs per courier (2 by default) are skipped.
If no courier qualifies, the order stays in the pool and is retried every round.

The courier's side

An assigned job reaches the courier app as a notification. Couriers have no accept or decline step; if a job must be taken back, you do that in the panel.
In the app the courier marks Picked up, the first-leg delivery for round trips, and Deliver. A courier can undo a delivery they marked by mistake within 15 minutes.
Jobs cannot be assigned to a courier who is in breakdown, accident or off-duty status, or whose shift is closed.
When a job is moved to another courier, both the new courier and the previous one are notified; the courier is also notified when their job is cancelled.

Notifications to customers

By default, only delivery triggers an SMS/e-mail to the sending customer and the contacts selected on the order (if the customer allows notifications).
Order created, cancelled and picked-up messages are off by default; you can turn them on under Settings › Notifications. The picked-up message is only sent for orders with a pickup point.
If you add {tracking_url} to a message template, the customer receives a tracking link to follow the shipment without signing in.

Warning: A delivered order cannot be cancelled directly; first undo the delivery with Undo delivery.

Having trouble?

The courier is not in the list: they are not on shift, or are in breakdown, accident or off-duty status.
There is no Assign to courier button: the order is awaiting approval (approve it first), or it has been picked up, delivered or cancelled.
The customer did not get the delivery message: the customer's notification permission may be off, or the company's SMS/e-mail channel is not set up; check Administration › Notification log.