Chapter 11
Truck & Driver
For businesses that deliver or receive goods by truck, the system can record which truck carried each sale, purchase, or direct delivery, and who drove it: the truck number, the driver's name, and the driver's phone. All three are optional on every transaction. The feature is off by default, so businesses that don't use trucks see no change.
11.1 Turning it on#
- Administration → Settings → Optional features.
- Switch on “Record truck & driver on sales and purchases.”
- Click “Save settings.”
11.2 Where you enter it#
| Screen | How it works |
|---|---|
| POS | Click “🚚 Add truck & driver” above the Notes field to open the fields. They're closed by default because most counter sales have no truck. |
| New / Edit Purchase | 🚚 Truck & Driver fields above the Notes field, always shown. |
| Direct Delivery | One set of fields for the delivery; the details are saved on both the customer sale and the supplier purchase. |
| Edit Sale | The fields can be corrected; the change is listed in the edit's audit entry. |
| Purchase import (CSV) | Optional truck_number, driver_name, and driver_phone columns — see section 11.5. |
| Sales import (CSV) | Optional truck_number, driver_name, and driver_phone columns, one truck per sale — see sections 4.7 and 11.5. |
11.3 Keeping entries consistent#
- Suggestions: as you type, the fields suggest trucks and drivers entered before. Picking a known driver fills in the phone number last recorded for them.
- Tidying: truck numbers are saved in capitals with single spaces and no spaces around hyphens — “gr 1234 - 20” becomes “GR 1234-20”. Driver names typed all in small letters or all in capitals are saved with each word capitalized — “efua ansah” becomes “Efua Ansah”; names with mixed capitals, like “McDonald” or “de Souza”, are kept exactly as typed.
- Same truck, same spelling: if the truck is already on record written differently (“GR-1234-20” vs “GR 1234 20” — spaces, hyphens, and slashes are ignored when comparing), the spelling already on record is used. Driver names are matched ignoring capitals.
- Phone numbers may use digits, spaces, brackets, hyphens, and a leading +, between 6 and 20 characters. Anything else is refused with a message, and the sale or purchase isn't saved until it's corrected or cleared.
11.4 Where it shows#
- The sale page, the POS receipt (on screen and printed), and the printed sale receipt
- The purchase page and the Goods Received Note (GRN)
- The direct delivery page
- The Sales and Purchases list searches — search by truck number, driver's name, or driver's phone
- Both sales exports: the Sales History export (Finance → Sales → “📤 Export Filtered”) as truck_number, driver_name, and driver_phone columns, and the Sales Report export (Reports → Sales Report) as Truck, Driver, and Driver's Phone columns
11.5 Importing purchases with a truck & driver#
The purchase import (Chapter 20) accepts three optional columns: truck_number, driver_name, and driver_phone. None of them is required — leave the cells blank, or leave the columns out of the file altogether, and the purchases import as normal. Click “Download Template” while the setting is on to get a file that already has them.
- One truck per invoice: rows with the same supplier and invoice_number become one purchase, so the truck and driver are taken from that invoice's first row that has them. You only need to fill them in once per invoice.
- Same rules as on screen: values are tidied and matched to spellings already on record (section 11.3).
- Checked in the preview: a driver_phone that isn't a phone number marks that row as an error in the preview, and it isn't imported until it's corrected or cleared.
- The sales import (section 4.7) takes the same three columns, with the same rules: rows with the same receipt_number are one sale, so the truck and driver are taken from that sale's first row that has them.