The spreadsheet with forty tabs
A retail customer orders point of sale for their spring promotion: posters, shelf strips and leaflets for every branch. The delivery list arrives as a spreadsheet with branch names, addresses, contact names and quantities per item. Some rows have no postcode. Two branches appear twice. Dispatch prints the sheet, packs by hand, writes the courier bookings one at a time and scribbles the quantities on packing notes.
A week later, three branches say they did not receive their leaflets. One says it got two boxes of posters. The customer asks for proof of delivery for all forty. Your dispatch manager spends an afternoon on three courier websites.
Why multi-drop jobs are fragile
Single-address jobs fit how most printers dispatch. Multi-drop jobs are a small logistics operation bolted onto a print job, and the tools are usually a spreadsheet and a courier's booking page.
- Address lists arrive in the customer's format, with errors and duplicates.
- Quantities per address are counted by hand at packing.
- Courier bookings are typed one by one, often across more than one carrier.
- Packing notes are handwritten or printed separately from the labels.
- Proof of delivery stays on the carrier's system and is fetched only when asked.
What goes wrong and what it costs
Mistakes in multi-drop jobs show up as missing or short deliveries, which mean reprints, extra couriers and an unhappy customer whose branches are all ringing head office. Dispatch time balloons on these jobs, and it is rarely charged properly. Without proof of delivery in one place, disputes take far longer than they should, and you often end up resending rather than proving.
A delivery plan for every job
- The customer's address list is imported and checked: missing postcodes, duplicates and addresses that do not match a known format are flagged before packing starts.
- Quantities per item per address are held on the job, totals are checked against what was printed, and shortfalls are flagged.
- Consignments are booked with your carriers through their APIs, choosing service by size and weight, and labels print in batches.
- Each parcel gets a packing note listing exactly what should be in it, generated from the plan, not written by hand.
- Tracking and proof of delivery are collected from the carriers automatically and attached to each address on the job.
- The customer gets a delivery report, and can see status per branch through a link if you choose.
| Task | By hand | With a delivery plan |
|---|---|---|
| Clean the address list | Found during packing | Flagged at import |
| Book couriers | One at a time | Batch booked via carrier API |
| Packing notes | Handwritten | Printed per parcel |
| Proof of delivery | Fetched on request | Collected onto the job |
We connect to the carriers you already use where they offer an API, and tell you plainly when one does not.
Dispatch after the change
Multi-drop jobs become routine rather than a dreaded afternoon. Errors in the customer's list are raised with them before anything is packed. When a branch says it received nothing, dispatch can show when and to whom the parcel was delivered. Dispatch time on these jobs is visible, so you can price multi-drop work properly next time.
Signs your split deliveries need help
- Delivery lists arrive as spreadsheets that need cleaning.
- Courier bookings for one job take hours.
- Branches report short or missing deliveries.
- Proof of delivery requests send someone to carrier websites.
- You are not sure whether multi-drop jobs are priced to cover the work.