About Sort Order
Sort orders are 4-digit, left-justified codes that you enter in the Sort Order box in the Customer Buyers/Manifest tab. The sort order indicates a customer's place on a route, in comparison to other customers on the same route. When you assign a sort order number to a customer, use all four digits, use multiples of 50, and begin with an unusually high number. This not only provides plenty of room to add sorts ahead of the first code used, it also makes inserting new customers to a route easier, because you don't have to change everyone's sort number.
Since the Sort Order box is left-justified, manifests are sorted by route in numeric sequence, starting from the left. For example, suppose you create a manifest with three pick tickets. Each ticket has a sort code: 1000, 2000, and 3000. The system sorts the tickets in the following manner:
1000
2000
3000
When you assign sort numbers to customers on a route, the invoices on a shipping manifest can be automatically sorted.
Before you can assign a sort order number to each customer, you must determine the order in which each customer receives delivery. To do so, you can either print a customer report and manually specify the sort order, or you can print a delivery manifest based on your active accounts to automatically update the sort number through the Delivery Manifest application.
Customer Report: Print the Customer Master Listing Report, ensuring that it is sorted by customer within a route. Use a page break before each customer. Then, go through this report with your driver(s) and determine the order in which customers receive deliveries. Arrange the pages of the report in order of delivery from first delivery to last delivery. Then, number each customer with a sort number.
Manifest: Create a manifest through the text-based (TS) Shipping Manifest screen based on a journal of the last three months. This should include most of the customers to whom you made deliveries during the last three months. Give the manifest to your driver(s) to rank each stop in the order it should be delivered, numbering each stop from first to last. Then, number each customer with the intended sort number.
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