Overview - where to start

If this is a new installation, make sure you read the notes on Planning your Installation.

Delivery Manager helps you organise your delivery of products.  It helps you keep track of customers and vehicles.  The system has no specific requirements regarding products and products can be grouped together within groups and sub-groups.  Products can also have multiple pricing teirs.  Before entering any other information you should also enter your Delivery areas (a list of 1 or more regions you deliver to - these can be used for grouping jobs together later), Delivery Times (a list of default times for deliveries and pickups, such as Morning, Afternoon, After 10am, etc) and Vehicles.  These are all entered from the tools section. 

To enter a job into the system you must first enter the customer details.  Once these have been entered (you can enter as much or as little as you like, but more information will make it easier to track jobs in future) you can create a new job for this customer.  Each job requires the customer record to exist before they can be entered into the system.  If more than 1 product is to be delivered, the multiple products can be entered on the one job.  The system does not keep track of vehicle availability.

Jobs can either be scheduled at time of entry, or by using the scheduling screen.  Jobs are always sorted by vehicle, delivery time and delivery area.

Invoices can be pre-printed for scheduled jobs, so these invoices can either be sent with the drivers or they can be mailed out after the job has been completed.  Invoices can only be printed for jobs once they have been scheduled.  This software provides only back accounting functions.  It is recommended that you use Delivery Manager in conjunction with an accounting package.

Once deliveries have been completed the job sheets are returned and they can be processed.  This involves the updating of payment details within the job and marking the job as completed.

The system will keep track of outstanding payments and warn an operator when entering a new job if there are amounts outstanding.

The reports available from the system are:

• delivery reports including delivery dockets, vehicle schedules and invoices;
• customer job history;
• invoices (as described above);
• outstanding jobs report which lists all outstanding jobs in the system;
• outstanding payments reports showing all outstanding payment customers (and amounts).

See the system maintainence section for recommendations on backing up your Delivery Manager data - this is an important step to ensure you don't lose any information in the event of a system malfunction or major catastrophe.

In general you can double click on any item to open/edit it.  The Close button is always in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.  You can access this help file at any time by pressing the F1 key, or by clicking on Help/Contents in the menu at the top.  You can quickly return to this page by accessing the System Overview option from the Help menu.

Click on a help topic of interest in the left-hand panel.