025 Tony's Tips // Custom Fields

Video Transcription

Hi All, Tony here from CartonCloud with Tony's Tips.

Now I've been in the transport industry a long time, and one of the frustrations I've always had with software is trying to get small changes, or trying to get custom fields in, or the little bits and pieces which we can do at CartonCloud, which other systems can't do. I don't know if people are using them to their full potential. Now I talk about custom fields. Now let me just show you. So if you go up into this search for anything, and I type in custom fields, we come in where we can actually add custom fields under the address, under a shipment container, and consignment data is the ones I want to talk about today. Now in the consignment data, what we can actually do is, and it's quite common for when I go in and I bring in a new customer, or onboard a new customer or a new tenant, if we go into the consignment, I find out the details which they need in their consignment note.

So for this one in here, I've come in and I do a quick add, and I do a consignment for Bob's Groceries, and I put in my reference number here, and then I've put in a custom field for a pallet type. So of course what I've got is chep, loscam or mixed see instructions. I've also put in another custom field just on the pallet transaction, whether it's a transfer, an exchange, or not applicable. Also, I've put in another custom field here which is just showing the time slot. Now these custom fields really just drive information, information for our fleet controllers or for the operation staff, or so that it flags to somebody so they know there's an exchange, or they know there's a transfer, and they can chase up the drivers for dockets and bits and pieces.

Now, don't get me wrong, we're not managing chep here, and if you want to manage chep, you can go to the likes of the 2IC, or Chepmate, or which is now MyChep. MyChep actually do a really good job in helping out anyone who's looking to manage their chep transactions properly. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to work in with those systems so that we can actually sort of put the information in working conjunction. So if I was to go into the custom fields, how I get this dropdown for a pallet type is in the custom fields, you can see I've got one here which is palette type. If I go to the edit, what I've done is we've got the name, which I've called pallet type. Now the name shows up on the consignment note.

It shows up for not only your staff but also for your customers if they're keying in their own consignments. The short name is how we can go through and where we put thing things on placeholders or bits and pieces like that. It's the same as the map field named on the bottom here. It actually shows up as place holders. Now this one we've got the dropdown field, so we can have it as an integer, as a decimal, as text. We can even have it as date time, which I'll show you in when we can go in, and for instance, I put in the time slot one. So with this one, we put it in as a drop down. Now in the dropdown field here, the dropdown options, what we do is we just put our options in there. We don't have space, and we just separate them with a comma.

Of course what then it gives us is this dropdown field here. So we can see we've got chep, loscam, and other. Same thing as I did with the pallet transaction, which is transfer, exchange or not applicable. I put not applicable because some customers will go in and say, “Well it's neither.” They think that they have to pick something. The other one is the time slot. So when I actually click on this time slot, because I set that dropdown as a date field, it actually gives me a calendar there so I can actually get the right date. So I think that with a little bit of information which you can get from our knowledge base, I think that you can come up with and anybody can go, any administrator can go into these custom fields, and you can do it for the addresses, or on run sheets, or whatever it may be.

But I think it's a very powerful tool which we give you guys access to, but a lot of people don't use it to their full potential. But anyway, if you want to find out anything more about custom fields, or you want a hand to set anything up, please get in contact with us, let us know, and we can go through and have a look at the system, and make sure that you're getting the most out of it. 

Just another one of Tony's Tips.