Setting up Ship Dates will help you report and schedule your desired pickup and ship dates to the Carriers you operate through.
 

NOTE: The steps detailed on this guide will vary depending on the Carrier. 


WARNING: This feature is not supported by every carrier. The capability to do so directly depends on the carrier availability to determine a Ship Date. 


Ship Dates can be set and configured in different parts of techSHIP, and on different levels.

While you could set up pickup open, close and ready hours as well as Weekends Mode in some cases at a general level, you could also define a specific Ship Date individually for a batch or an order.


This article details these scenarios separately, from the most general case, to the most specific.


CARRIER LEVEL SHIP/PICKUP DATES SETUP

Ship Dates can be automatically determined by Carrier Baseline Account configuration based on pickup open, close and ready hours. If these are configured this way, every shipment handled through them will, by default, be subject to that logic.


Pickup Open, Close and Ready hours are defined as:

  • Pickup open time: Time in HH:MM format when the warehouse is open for pick up 

  • Pickup close time: Time in HH:MM format when the warehouse closes for pick up

  • Pickup ready hours: Amount of hours it will take you to be ready from your open time


Additionally Weekends Mode can also affect an automatically set pickup date based on weekend availability, where the options typically are:

  • Ignore weekends: Weekend days are considered like any other week day
  • Saturday and Sunday: Saturday and Sunday are blocked from operation
  • Sunday: Sunday is blocked from operation, while Saturday is considered like any other week day


These fields can be found at the Baseline Account Setup, under Maintenance > Carriers > Selected Carriers > Account > Carrier tab



As a practical example, this order printed at 2:08 PM with Ready Hours set to 2.

The Pickup Open time is set to 3 PM, and the Pickup Close time to 4 PM.

This renders the order ready past the Close Time. 

Any orders ready before the Close Time will be automatically set to be picked up and shipped within the current day, and those past it, would be scheduled for the next business day (taking the Weekends Mode setup, if any).


WARNING: These fields don't perform an actual request for pickup, rather determine the Ship Date on the label. If you need to guarantee that the carrier will pick up shipments at that specific date, depending on your agreement with them, you either need to call them or setup pickup requests from techSHIP (if supported by the carrier, through Plugins section accessible in the techSHIP Web Client's Top Menu Bar), or if your daily pickup already includes weekends no additional action is required.


 


BATCH LEVEL MANUAL ASSIGNMENT

Weekend special features (when supported by the carrier), if checked, allow to receive accurate rates based on the pickup and delivery requests. These do not have direct influence on the pickup process unless the carrier supports so, rather allow to provide accurate rating. Details on effective pickup have been clarified in the previous section.




Ship dates can arbitrarily be set up at the Batch level once it is imported, and before it's processed.


To do so, import the order/batch, but don't process it yet. Before you do so:


1. Select the Ship Date (a value in the future)


2. Press Save to apply the changes


3. Proceed to Process & Print




DESKTOP CLIENT MANUAL ASSIGNMENT

You can set the Ship Date of all orders processed through a packing station by configuring the techSHIP Desktop Client. This setup has to be updated daily, typically before the packing station starts operation, or after the Pickup Close time is through (to schedule orders processed past it to a future date).


Details into how to do so can be found at Set up a future Ship Date for your orders through Desktop Client [Step-by-Step guide].