How to create consignments using the Admin Portal
Hitrak customers may need to create consignments in the Admin Portal for various of reasons, depending on the freight service provider's business. This could be in cases such as operators who:
→ Prefer to create consignments on their customers' behalf.
→ Provide one-off deliveries for individual senders or receivers who are not set up as customers in their Hitrak instance.
→ Need to resolve issues with an original consignment; e.g., an invoicing error, or a previously missing freight item which needs to be sent in a separate consignment.
The Admin Portal allows for consignments to be created manually or imported in bulk using a file template.
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.
Tip💡 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.
Consignment Import
For customers who choose not to use the Freightmaster customer portal, have a high number of consignments or have not integrated with Hitrak via an API, a file import option is available in the Admin Portal.
Supported file formats
The following formats can be used for consignment import files:
Hitrak CSV
Hitrak JSON
Hitrak XML
Tip💡Import file templates vary based on the service types, freight types and other settings available to your customers. Contact the Hitrak team for 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.