Shipments

A shipment is the actual transportation of cargo: the trip on which the cargo physically travels from one place to another. If a request answers the question "what and for whom are we carrying", then a shipment answers "by what means, along which route and when".

One or several requests can be attached to one shipment — the cargo of each of them travels on this trip. This is how a consolidated (groupage) transportation is drawn up: the cargo of several clients in one vehicle.

The link with requests

• At any moment a request is attached to at most one shipment.
• A shipment can contain many requests — they all travel together (a one-to-many relationship).
• You can create a shipment and attach requests later, or you can assemble a shipment around already existing requests.
• When a shipment is deleted, the linked requests are not deleted — their "Shipment" field is cleared.

The shipment type belongs to the shipment, not to the request

The mode of transport / the direction (for example "road", "Rotterdam", "Turkey") is set specifically on the shipment — through the company's shipment types directory. The starting status also depends on the selected type (see the auto-status section below).

What is stored in a shipment

Some attributes live on the shipment itself, and some on the transportation legs and in finances.

Stored directly on the shipment:

• Number — the identifier of the trip (entered manually at creation).
• Shipment type — from the company's type directory (configured by the administrator in the directories). There can be many types, and they reflect directions/modes of transportation.
• Status — from the shipment statuses directory; the statuses can be specific to each type (see Statuses).
• Planned delivery date and actual delivery date.
• Comment (up to 5,000 characters).
• Custom fields — if the administrator has configured them for shipments (see Custom fields).
• Fields for the electronic consignment note (ETrN): the method of measuring the mass, the climate mode (refrigerator/thermos/isothermal), the temperature range, the humidity, the special transportation instructions, the details of the person carrying out the loading. They are used when issuing electronic consignment notes and are not mandatory for ordinary transportation.

The route, the carrier and the transport live on the legs; the money lives in finances

• The route (sender, receiver, addresses), the carrier, the driver, the vehicle and the trailer are entered in the shipment form but are stored as the transportation leg(s) of this trip. A simple trip has one leg; a multimodal one has several (see Multimodal transportation).
• The requisites of the parties (for print forms and calculations) are derived by the system from the selected sender/receiver/carrier — there is no separate "requisites" field.
• The cost of the transportation is reflected by financial operations (income from the clients, expenses towards the carrier) — there is no separate "tariff" field on a shipment. See Financial operations. Do not confuse this with the "Tariff" field in a request: there it is the rate from the tariff directory at which the client's cargo was accepted.

The delivery dates live on the shipment, not on the request

The delivery deadlines are stored specifically on the shipment, and both dates are entered manually:

• Planned delivery date — when the cargo is expected at the receiver.
• Actual delivery date — when the shipment actually arrived (the warehouse worker is allowed to edit it).

This is not the same as the creation date of a request or a shipment — that one is set automatically by the system and only means the moment the record appeared. Separately: when a shipment moves into a final status, the system automatically sets the end date of the last leg of the transportation (see below) — that is a technical mark for analytics, not the "actual delivery date" field.

Creating a shipment: a 4-step wizard

Click "Add shipment" in the Shipments section — a step-by-step wizard opens. If the company has custom shipment fields configured, an extra step "Additional info" appears between "Transport" and "Summary".

Step 1. General

• Shipment number * (mandatory) — entered manually (for example, test123).
• Shipment type * (mandatory) — a choice from the company's types (for example, "Rotterdam").
• The Planned date of delivery and the Actual date of delivery — as needed.

Below the form there is a hint: "Status will be automatically assigned as default for the selected shipment type".

The auto-status by shipment type

Unlike with a request, the shipment status does not need to be selected at creation — the system assigns it itself:

1. first, the "default" status set for the selected type of shipment is looked up;
2. if there is none for the type, the general "default" status is taken (the one with no type binding);
3. if there is none of those either, the system picks a suitable status automatically.

That is why the set of statuses and the starting status depend on which shipment type you have chosen.

Step 2. Logistics

The "Logistics details" block (the route and the carrier):

• Sender and Sender address (with an address/geopoint picker button).
• Receiver and Receiver address (with an address/geopoint picker button).
• Carrier.

The parties can be selected from the directories (a client, a counterparty, your legal entity) or entered manually; new counterparties can be created right from the form.

Step 3. Transport

Unlike with a request, the first leg of a shipment contains the transport:

• Driver — the full name and the phone (from the driver directory or entered manually).
• Vehicle — the licence plate, the make/model (from the vehicle directory or entered manually).
• Trailer — the licence plate of the trailer (optional).

Step 4. Summary

The summary of the shipment (number, type, planned date, sender and address, receiver and address, carrier, driver, vehicle, trailer) and the Comment field. Click "Create".

What is created "under the hood"

Out of the data of the "Logistics" and "Transport" steps the first transportation leg (LogisticLeg) of the shipment is formed — already with the transport. Further legs (for multimodal transportation) are added in the shipment card with the "+ Add leg" button (see Multimodal transportation).

Viewing a shipment in detail

Clicking a row opens the "Shipment #N" card: the badge of the current status (with the option to change it), the pencil button (Edit), Print (print forms) and Close. Editing can also be invoked from the context menu (right-click on a shipment → Edit).

The card is split into three tabs.

The "Route" tab

The cards of the transportation legs (Leg 1, Leg 2, …). For each leg you can see:

• From — the sender and the address.
• To — the receiver and the address.
• Carrier.
• Transport — the make and the licence plate of the vehicle, the trailer.
• Driver — the full name and the phone (the phone is clickable).

The "+ Add leg" button is here as well. Below it there is the "General" block (shipment type, creation date, planned and actual delivery dates) and the "Comment".

The "Cargo" tab

The summary of the trip's cargo and the list of the attached requests:

• Summary cards: Requests, Packages, Weight, Volume.
• The request table: Number, Client, Packages, Weight, Volume, Status, and the "Total" row.

The request card opens right from here

Clicking a request row opens its card on top of the shipment — there is no need to leave for the "Requests" section and look for the right number. The card opens for viewing: to edit the request, open it in the Requests section.

Once you close the card, you return to the same shipment, to the same tab.

The cargo of a shipment is assembled from the requests

The number of requests, the packages, the weight and the volume of a shipment are not entered manually — they are the sums over the attached requests:

• Requests — the number of attached requests;
• Packages — the sum of the "number of packages" of the requests;
• Weight / Volume — the sum of the declared weight and volume of the requests;
• Actual weight / Actual volume (in the shipment table) — the sum of the actual weight and volume of the requests.

To change these figures, change the data in the requests themselves (including the actual values from the packages at acceptance). For a client these sums are calculated only over their own requests.

The "Files" tab

The documents of the trip laid out in folders. For details see the Files section below and Files in logistics.

Transportation legs and multimodality

One shipment can consist of one or several legs. Every leg (a section of the route) contains its own sender, receiver, carrier, addresses, transport (driver/vehicle/trailer) and start and end dates.

Extra legs are added with the "+ Add leg" button on the "Route" tab — this is how a multimodal transportation is drawn up (for example road → rail → road). For details see Multimodal transportation.

Auto-filling the dates between the legs

If there are several legs, a leg with no end date gets it from the start date of the next leg ("the end of the previous one = the start of the next one"). It is only filled into empty fields — values entered manually are not overwritten. The nuances are in the Multimodal transportation section.

Statuses and the lifecycle

The set of shipment statuses is configured to match the company and can be specific to each type of shipment. The standard installation creates a basic set of 4 statuses:

Order	Name	Default	Final
1	Expected	✅
2	Loading
3	In transit
4	Delivered		✅

In practice companies create detailed statuses for their directions (for example "Awaiting documents", "Customs of Belarus", "En route to the border", "At the warehouse in Moscow", "In the port of Rotterdam", "Delivered"). For details on configuration see the Statuses section.

Changing the status

The status is changed through the "Update shipment status" window (the Status and Comment fields), which is opened by clicking the status in the table or in the shipment card.

There are no hard restrictions on transitions — you can move to any status and in any direction. Every change is recorded in the history (who, when, which status).

Transition into a final status

When a shipment moves into a status with the "Final" flag (for example, "Delivered"):

• a separate delivery notification is sent;
• the end date of the last transportation leg is set automatically (if it is empty) to the current date.

This affects the calculation of the transportation time in analytics.

The shipment list and the jump to requests

The shipment table shows: the number, the creation date, the planned and the actual delivery dates, the status, the shipment type, the number of requests, the number of packages, the weight, the volume, the actual weight, the actual volume, the author and the comment. Search, filters, export to CSV/XLSX and column settings are available.

The "Number of requests" column is a quick jump

The figure in the "Number of requests" column is how many requests are attached to the trip. Clicking this figure opens the Requests section with the filter by this shipment already applied — handy for seeing its whole content at once.

Finances of a shipment

Two types of financial operations are linked to a shipment:

• Income — what the clients will pay for the attached requests.
• Expense — what you will pay the carrier (effectively the "tariff" of the transportation).

Profit = income − expenses; for a multi-leg transportation the expenses usually consist of payments to several carriers. For details see Financial operations and Settlements.

Deleting a shipment

A shipment cannot be deleted if it has requests attached or has posted financial documents. Detach the requests and sort out the finances first. This protects the linked data from being lost.

Files

The documents of a shipment (consignment notes, waybills, transport permits, contracts, cargo photos, acceptance certificates) are uploaded into the "Files" tab of the shipment card: drag-and-drop or file selection, laid out in folders.

• The maximum file size in the shipment upload window is 100 MB (in the request wizard the window shows 50 MB).
• The maximum number of files per upload is 50.
• The formats in the window's hint: PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, JPG, JPEG, PNG, TXT.
• Asynchronous archiving is supported — all the files of a trip can be downloaded as an archive with no hard limit on their number (the archive is prepared in the background).

The upload limits and the general storage rules

The figures above are the restrictions of the upload window in the interface. On the server side the general rules of the secure storage apply, with limits per file category (images, documents, archives) and a closed list of formats. The full rules, formats, role-based access and security principles — in the Files in logistics section.

Search and filters

• By status — for example "shipments in transit".
• By shipment type.
• By the number of requests, by the planned and the actual delivery dates.
• By the attached requests and the clients of those requests.

Who can do what with a shipment (roles)

Action	Administrator	Head	Manager	Warehouse worker	Client
See shipments	✅ of their company	✅ of their company	✅ of their company	✅ of their company	⚠️ only those that contain their request
Create a shipment	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
Edit a shipment (in full)	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
Change only the delivery date and the comment	—	—	—	✅	❌
Change the shipment status	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌
Delete a shipment	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
Add/edit transportation legs	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
See the "Route" and "Cargo" tabs	✅	✅	✅	✅	⚠️ for their own requests
See the "Files" tab	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌ (hidden)
Upload/delete files	✅	✅	✅	⚠️ delete — only their own files	❌
Download the shipment files	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌

Notes on the roles

• The client sees a shipment only if it contains at least one of their requests, and only the "Route" and "Cargo" tabs (for their own requests). The "Files" tab is not shown to the client. On the "Route" tab they see the parties, the addresses and the dates, but not the carrier and not the transport (driver, vehicle, trailer) — who exactly carries the cargo stays the freight forwarder's commercial information. The restriction applies both in the interface and in the API.
• The warehouse worker does not create or delete shipments and does not edit them as a whole, but can change the status and edit the actual delivery date and the comment in the card.
• Creating, editing and deleting transportation legs is available to the roles from manager and above.

Common mistakes when working with shipments

• "The status cannot be selected at creation." That is by design: the status is assigned automatically by the shipment type. It can be changed right after creation.
• "Where is the tariff / requisites field?" There are no such fields on a shipment: the expense towards the carrier is drawn up as a financial operation, the rate for the client's cargo is set by the tariff in the request, and the requisites are derived from the parties of the leg — see the "The route, the carrier and the transport…" callout.
• "There is no planned loading date." A shipment only has the planned and the actual delivery dates. The loading/unloading dates are reflected by the start and end dates of the legs.
• "The weight/packages/volume of the shipment are wrong." These figures are summed up from the attached requests — correct the data in the requests, not in the shipment.
• A shipment will not delete. Check that it has no requests attached and no posted financial documents.
• A client cannot see their trip or its files. A client sees a shipment only if it contains their request; the files of a trip are not shown to the client.

What's next

• Requests — how to create a client's order and attach it to a shipment.
• Multimodal transportation — the transportation legs and transshipments.
• Statuses — how the administrator configures the workflow and the statuses per type.
• Financial operations — the income and the expenses of a shipment.
• Files in logistics — formats, limits and access.
• Electronic consignment notes (ETrN) — issuing a consignment note without paper.