Sheet 05 · after the door
Courier and tracking
Once a cage is scanned at the goods-out door the parcel is in a carrier network and this desk sees exactly what you see. This sheet covers the handover, what the scans mean, and what we do when one stops.
Handover
Cage to driver at the goods-out door
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Cages staged
Sealed parcels are loaded into cages in the order they were packed, heaviest at the base, so nothing is carrying a load it was not boxed for.
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Manifest printed
One manifest lists every consignment leaving on that collection. It is the only document that ties our sheet to the carrier's round.
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Driver scans
The driver scans the manifest at the door. That scan is what turns a raised consignment into a collected one on a tracking page.
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Count agreed
The parcel count on the manifest is agreed at the door before the cages go on the vehicle. A count that does not match is settled there, not later.
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Copy filed
The manifest copy is filed against the day. When a query is raised weeks later, that is the piece of paper the query is built from.
Scans
Reading a tracking page honestly
A tracking page is a list of scans with times attached. It records where a parcel has been seen, not where it is now and not when it will arrive. Between two scans a parcel is on a vehicle or in a cage on a hub floor, and nothing is published about it.
A page showing nothing for a day is usually a parcel that moved overnight and has not yet been sorted at the receiving hub. A page that shows the same depot twice is normal: parcels are sorted more than once on a journey across the country.
The states themselves, in the carrier's own vocabulary, are listed on sheet 01.
Queries
When a scan stops moving
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Give the sort a working day
Most stalled pages move again on the next working day's sort. A query raised inside that window usually gets answered by the scan itself.
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Say what the page last showed
Email the order number with the last state and the time on it. We match it to the consignment and the manifest line, which is what a carrier enquiry needs.
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Enquiry raised with the carrier
The enquiry goes in against the consignment number. The carrier searches its own scans and, where needed, the hub the parcel was last seen at.
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The answer is passed on as given
What the carrier says is sent on in the carrier's words. We do not improve it, and we do not predict a delivery day the carrier has not stated.
Where the answer is that a parcel is lost or damaged in the network, the file moves to a claim. Sheet 09 covers that, including the photographs that have to exist before the box is flattened.
Address changes
Redirecting a consignment in transit
Once a label is printed the address on it is the address the network works to. Some carriers let a recipient change a delivery day or a neighbour instruction from the tracking page or the card left at the door, and where that option exists it is faster than anything this desk can do.
A full address change after collection is a carrier decision, not ours. Where it cannot be done, the parcel completes its journey or returns to sender, and a returned parcel is booked in at goods-in against its original manifest line before anything else happens to it.