Today the revised offer system goes into testing. This update is the culmination of months of design and represents a significantly more functional way to price shipments.

Instead of a list of provisions created to meet specific customer requirements, the pricing system separates service provisions from offer pricing.

This feature is activated by selecting “Zone System” as the offer model in the Edit Customer page.

Today we implemented two additional customer reference fields which can be set in the shipment editor.

Fields #2 and #3 are not always transmitted to the courier and are not always present on the waybill but they are recorded in our database for presentation on customer invoices. These fields are also present (and have been for imported shipment records) on the CSV invoice file.

Currently all three fields are present on the FedEx labels and we will continue to implement them for other carriers.

Today we completed implementation of the Purolator Zone system (domestic and international). In total over 50 separate published zone documents were translated from PDF into data structures. This feature allows us to price shipments for customers with per-zone precision and also to record account discounts at the same precise level.

Today we implemented a means to customise the footer blocks that appear at the bottom of every page. Partners and resellers can now choose what appears in these blocks, whether they are links to the site or external links.

This is configured by partners only so resellers must submit the request to their partner administrator.

Today a useful feature was added to the administrative interface that can be used to identify basic shipping patterns for customers.

The advantage of this very simple approach is that you can very quickly get a sense of the customer’s level of activity.  This chart doesn’t indicate how profitable they are but it does let you spot declining usage fairly easily.

It is now impossible to post (or even preview) and invoice that contains a flagged shipment.  This has several consequences and allows us to solve a persistent problem with voided shipments.

What this means is that if you have a shipment that requires future attention you can flag it to ensure it never gets accidentally invoiced before you are ready.

This addresses various needs but also a specific issue: if a shipment needs to be voided but the carrier no longer permits this, what do you do?  The recommended method is to find the shipment and use the “Refund” command to credit the customer.  For some carriers a shipment that is not handed to a driver doesn’t get billed but for some carriers it does.  Purolator, for example, cannot credit you for a shipment until the bill is submitted.  Thus if you refund a shipment and later get billed for it a correction will be generated and the customer will get invoiced.

By flagging the shipment, when it is reconciled it will prevent the invoice with a message that lets the operator track it down and contact the carrier for a credit, then unflag the shipment and use the “Refund” command then.

Today a residential checkbox was added to the Quick Quotes feature allowing more accurate pricing without the need for a full quote.

In addition after country selection the next field is automatically focused, starting with the consignee country. These adjustments make it possible to use nothing but the keyboard for a quote.

Over the last few days we have implemented FedEx Zone calculations for Canadian and US FedEx accounts.  The system is now capable of identifying the pricing zone for any shipment, whether domestic or international.

Of particular interest was FedEx US Domestic zones which required over 150,000 records to be processed.  Ultimately all the data was sourced from the FedEx 2015 Service Guides for US and Canada through the creation of custom text processing software.  Data was copied out of the brochure and processed into in-memory data structures that will now form part of the FedEx module.

We have now implemented an important feature to aid quick shipment pricing: default rating locations for countries.   For each country we define a location for pricing.  When users quote international shipments it is now possible to specify only the country and retrieve a price.  This is useful for quickly gauging the cost of an international shipment but additional fees such as remote area charges will not be presented.