How the electronic consignment note works

Business appShop appDriver appFleet appStore app

Every load carries its consignment note electronically. Using it, the sender, the carrier and the receiver agree to these procedures: how it is made out and handed over, how it stays as signed, who reads it, how delivery is confirmed, how it is added to, and how it is replaced by paper.

Steps

1. Made out and handed over: the sender confirms the note by posting the load, from its own sign-in. The carrier confirms it at taking over, after the load-safety check, from the driver’s own phone. Each party opens it in its own app, and the sender is emailed a link to it when the goods are delivered.

2. Kept as signed: at every signature and every remark — taking over, a reload, a seal changed, delivery, a refusal, a claim — the note is frozen as a new copy with a fingerprint of its own. A frozen copy is never changed. Anybody can check a printed copy against its fingerprint, at the address printed at its foot.

3. Who reads it: the sender and the carrier — the driver and the driver’s fleet — read the whole note, by their own sign-in; a load number alone opens nothing. The business the goods are delivered to reads the receiver’s copy, without the carriage price unless the carriage is theirs to pay.

4. Delivery confirmed: at the door the driver records the receiver’s name, a photo of the goods as delivered, and anything the receiver found not as the note says, written beside their name. That confirmation is frozen into a new copy.

5. Added to, never rewritten: a later instruction from the sender is added with its date, and the carrier’s reservations are added where they arise. Each addition is a new copy; the earlier copies stay readable as they were.

6. Replaced by paper when paper is asked for: print the note from the app. On paper it asks which original it is — the sender’s, the one that travels with the goods, or the carrier’s — and has a line under each confirmation for a signature by hand. Its fingerprint ties it to the electronic copy it was printed from.