Automatic Percentage-Based Delivery Charge with Minimum Charge

Enhancement Voting
1

Name of Feature/Request: Automatic Percentage-Based Delivery Charge with Minimum Charge

What financial, time savings, or quality of life improvements will occur with this: Our sales orders and invoices fall into three categories:

  • In-store Purchase (no delivery charge)
  • Will Call (no delivery charge)
  • Delivery (delivery charge required)

For delivery orders, our current pricing is 16% of the merchandise subtotal or $250, whichever is greater.

Today, our sales staff must manually calculate the delivery charge, add a delivery line item, and enter the amount by hand. If products, quantities, or pricing change later, the delivery charge must be recalculated manually.

An automated calculation would:

  • Eliminate manual calculations on every delivery order.
  • Prevent billing errors caused by forgotten or incorrect freight calculations.
  • Ensure every salesperson calculates delivery charges consistently.
  • Automatically keep delivery charges accurate as orders are edited.
  • Reduce credits, rebilling, and customer disputes resulting from incorrect delivery charges.
  • Save several minutes on every delivery order, which becomes a significant time savings across hundreds or thousands of orders each year.

Attempted solutions so far: Our current workaround is to create a Delivery line item and manually calculate the charge before entering it.

This process works but is highly dependent on the user remembering to:

  1. Calculate 16% of the current merchandise subtotal.
  2. Compare that amount to our $250 minimum.
  3. Enter the correct delivery charge.
  4. Recalculate everything again if the order changes.

Any change to quantities, pricing, discounts, or products requires the delivery charge to be manually recalculated, creating many opportunities for human error.

Digging deep - Any additional Why behind this request / How was this accomplished before Striven: Our delivery pricing is intentionally based on the value of the order because larger orders generally require more labor, equipment, and transportation resources. At the same time, we maintain a minimum delivery charge of $250 to ensure our transportation costs are covered on smaller deliveries.

Ideally, Striven would allow administrators to configure a delivery item with rules such as:

  • Apply only when the order is designated as a Delivery (not In-Store Purchase or Will Call).
  • Calculate the charge automatically as 16% of the merchandise subtotal.
  • Apply a minimum charge of $250.
  • Automatically recalculate whenever products, quantities, pricing, or discounts change.
  • Allow users to override the calculated amount when necessary.
  • Optionally configure these rules at either the company level or the item level so businesses can support different delivery pricing models.

This would eliminate one of the few remaining manual calculations in our sales process while improving accuracy, efficiency, and consistency. I believe this enhancement would benefit many Striven users in industries such as wholesale distribution, nurseries, landscape suppliers, building materials, and other businesses where delivery charges are calculated as a percentage of the order rather than as a fixed amount.

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1 Answer

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I’d love to see the discount line item type duplicated for that purpose, with a ‘max amount’. There are a lot of fun things you could do with it.

Additionally, I’d love to be able to select items to be placed on the sales order upon creation, dependent on the sales order type. For example, for sales order type “Hearth Install” it would automatically have the basic hearth installation items, the extended service plan options, and the annual service subscription options already on the sales order when beginning to make the order. It’s a little thing, but when you make 20+ orders a day, saving those 25-30 button presses is a huge benefit. It also keeps new salespeople from forgetting important items. Sure, this can almost be done with a template, but it’s easier to update if it’s set at the sales order type formatting.

1 Like