How to create consignments using the Admin Portal
Hitrak provides a number of methods for creating customer freight jobs, including efficient ways for Admin users to add consignments directly in the Admin Portal. This supports use cases such as:
-> Operators who prefer to create consignments on their customers' behalf.
-> One-off deliveries for individual senders or receivers, who are not set up as customers in Hitrak.
-> Issues with a consignment that require resolution, which mean a new consignment needs to be created, such as an Invoicing error or split consignment.
This article is a guide for Admin users on creating consignments in the Admin Portal.
In this article:
Manual Consignment Entry
Consignments can be created via the Consignments menu as follows:
- From the sidebar menu, select Consignments > New Consignment.
- Select the customer. This determines the dropdown options for the other customer fields in the first section.
- Select the Requesting Site, Invoice Account and Service Type for the consignment.
- Enter a Requested Delivery Date.
- Enter the Sender and Receiver details. These can be selected from the customer's list of sites, or entered manually.
- Enter the freight details. The quantity, item type, description, weight and volume/dimensions must be entered for each line of freight.
- When finished, click Save and Close.
✨ If the Length, Width & Height dimensions of a freight line are entered, its volume will calculate automatically.
Bulk Entry
If several consignments need to be created manually for the same customer, the Save and Create Next option facilitates bulk entry, without the need to navigate away from the Edit screen. This moves the user directly to a new consignment page, but stores the basic details from the previous one.
When all the information has been entered for one consignment:
- Click Save and Create Next. A new consignment is created with the Customer, Requesting Site, Invoice Account, Service Type, Requested Delivery Date and Sender fields already populated, based on the the previous consignment's information.
- Complete the Receiver and Freight details.
- Change any other details as required, e.g. Service Type.
- Click Save and Create Next to continue with bulk creation, or Save and Close to exit this flow.
When multiple consignments have been created consecutively, a count of these is shown in the History button at the top of the page.
💡 If consignments need to be cross-referenced against another document, e.g., a customer order sheet, a list of the user's recently created consignments is accessible via the History button while still in Edit mode.
File Import
For customers who choose not to use the Freightmaster Customer portal, or have a high number of consignments and have not integrated with Hitrak via API, a file import option is available.
Supported file formats
The system can accept consignment imports in CSV, JSON and XML formats.
As Import file templates vary based on the Service types, Freight types and other settings available to your customers, the Hitrak team will provide a customised consignment template.
Importing a consignment file
To upload a file of consignment data:
- From the sidebar menu, navigate to Consignments>Import.
- Choose the file format, and click Browse to upload the file from a computer folder.
- Click Load & Validate to begin the import and validate the consignment settings.
- Change the service type or delivery date if needed. If no changes are made at this point, defaults will apply (as per the supporting text under these fields).
- Click Upload.
- When the file has uploaded successfully, a summary of the imported consignment data is available.
- Click View Consignments to see a list of the imported consignments.
✨ Consignments are imported in Draft status, to allow for further individual editing as required.
For more information on managing Consignments in the Admin Portal, see Understanding Consignments and Editing Consignments.