Picking and packing a delivery note

Where delivery notes live

Inside your warehouse, Dispatching → Delivery notes lists every note, with a Stats tab and a History tab alongside the main list. The list itself is split into stage tabs down the side: Dispatched, All, To do, Queued, Handling, Waiting, Picked, Packing, Packed and Finalised. Each tab shows only the notes currently in that stage, with a count next to its name, so you can see at a glance how much is sitting where.

A note's stage is called its state. In order, a note passes through:

• To do — nothing has started yet.
• Queued — sitting inside a picking session, waiting for that session to start.
• Handling — being picked.
• Waiting — picking has stopped because something on the note needs a decision.
• Picked — every line has been picked.
• Packing — being packed.
• Packed — every line has been packed.
• Finalised — ready to leave, shipment details set.
• Dispatched — gone.
• Cancelled — the note was cancelled.

Picking

A note becomes pickable either on its own, from the To do tab, or as part of a picking session — a batch of notes picked together. Picking sessions have their own screen, reached from Dispatching → Picking sessions, with the same kind of stage tabs: In Process, Picking, Waiting, Picked, Packed, and All.

Pressing Start picking on a note moves it to Handling and records who is picking it. If the note was queued inside a session, starting the session's own pick moves every note in it to Handling the same way, and whoever started the session becomes the picker on each note. A note already assigned to somebody else shows a locked padlock instead of the picking button — press Unlock to pick to take it over.

While a note is being picked, a line can turn out to need a decision the picker cannot make on the bench — for example a replacement or a release from the warehouse. When that happens the whole note moves to Waiting rather than letting picking continue around the problem. Once nothing is genuinely waiting any more, an Auto Finish Waiting button appears, and pressing it checks the note over and, if every line really is resolved, carries it on to Picked.

Batches

For products whose stock has batches, each pick shows the batch it was taken from. You do not have to choose it: the system takes the batch with the earliest best-before date on that location, after any stock that has no batch recorded. When one pick needs more than that batch holds, the pick splits into one line per batch, for example 4 from one batch and 2 from the next, so the delivery note, the invoice and the receiving warehouse see every batch that left the shelf. If you picked from a different batch, open the batch on the pick and change it. Deleting a pick puts its batch back on the shelf, and returned goods go back as the batches that were picked. The delivery note PDF lists the batch, best-before date and quantity under each item.

Sets sold only complete

Some products are made of several parts that are useless apart, like a salt lamp with its bulb and cable. On the master product's Composition page these have Sold only as a complete set switched on. A shop product set not to follow its master's parts has the same switch on its own Composition page, and the master lists it among the shops that differ.

If one part of such a set is not picked, the other parts of that set can not go out on their own. The note will not move to Picked: it goes to Waiting, and a Parts put back button appears on it. Its tooltip names the parts to take out of the tote. Put them back on their shelf, then press Parts put back. Their picks are reversed, so the stock returns to its location, the parts are marked not picked, and the note carries on to Picked. The customer is refunded the whole product.

When the switch is off, the parts that were found are sent and the customer is refunded only the value of the missing part.

From picked to packing

Once every line on a note is picked, it sits in Picked with a Start packing button. For most shops this is a separate step: pressing it moves the note into Packing, records who is packing it, and unassigns any picking bay that was holding it. For dropshipping shops, packing is skipped — from Picked the button reads Set as packed instead, taking the note straight to Packed in one step.

During packing, the note cannot be marked Set as packed if it still has lines waiting on a replacement decision or a warehouse release — that block has to clear first.

Pressing Set as packed records who packed the note, sweeps in any lines that were not confirmed line-by-line at the bench, and sets a default parcel if none has been recorded yet.

Parcels are recorded in the Add shipment window, opened from the delivery note or from its row in a picking session. Each parcel row has a Preset size list next to its dimensions: picking a box size, such as 39 × 39 × 39 cm, fills in length, width and height in one go, so only the weight needs typing.

If a note needs to go back a step, editable notes carry undo buttons: Undo set as picked returns a Picked note to picking, Undo packing returns a Packing note to picked, and Unpack takes a Packed or Finalised note back to Packing.

Finalising and dispatching with a shipper

Once a Packed note has its parcels recorded, it carries a single Finalise and Dispatch button (the label changes to Dispatch or Finalise and set as Collected for a replacement note or one going by collection instead of a shipper). Pressing it finalises the note — which is refused if no shipment has been recorded — and dispatches it in the same step: marking the note dispatched, recording the dispatch time on every line, and, for notes tied to a customer order, carrying the order itself on to dispatched.

A dispatched note can be pulled back with Undispatch, which returns it to packed.

Cancelling a note

A note can be cancelled from any stage before it is finalised or dispatched — cancelling a finalised or dispatched note is refused. Cancelling releases anything already picked or packed back into stock, marks every line on the note as cancelled, and detaches it from any trolley or picking bay it was using. Where the note belongs to a customer order, the order itself is rolled back too, unless it has already been cancelled, finalised or dispatched.