If you use external suppliers to transport hire equipment to or from customer sites, you can generate transport purchase orders directly from the Enter Hire Contract, Off Hire, and related screens. These orders can also be linked to purchase invoices for reconciliation.

Transport orders can also be raised for:

• Advice Notes

• Site Movements

• Depot Transfers

• Hire Exchanges

Topics Included in this Article

• Supplier Setup

• Creating Transport Orders

• Raising an Order

• Cancelling an Order

• Printing Transport Orders

• Querying and Managing Orders

• Entering Purchase Invoices

Supplier Setup

Marking a Supplier for Transport

Navigate to the Transport tab on the Amend Suppliers screen and tick Supplies Transport to indicate that the supplier offers transportation services.

Key Supplier Options

Order Duration

Determines how long an order remains open for adding trips:

• Single Trip: Separate order per trip. Closes automatically upon confirmation.

• Day: Reuse order until end of the day.

• Week: Reuse order until end of the week.

• Month: Reuse order until end of the month.

• User Defined: Remains open until manually closed via Open Transport Orders.

Order Pricing Method

• Per Trip (default): Each trip is priced separately.

• Per Order: Fixed price for the duration (day/week/month). Must enter the agreed price.

Additional Options

• Multi-Depot Orders?: Allow multiple depots to add to the same order.

• Multi-Branch Orders?: Allow multiple branches of the supplier to add trips to the same order.

Creating Transport Orders

Where to Create Orders

Raising an Order

1. Click Transport Order and choose a supplier (only those flagged as “Supplies Transport” are shown).
   

2. Select the supplier contact.

3. If adding to an existing open order, the order number appears. If not, a new number is generated.

4. Press OK to create and view the new order.
   

Order Details Auto-Populated

• Date/Time and From/To locations from the contract.

• Equipment Description: Pulled from first contract item—update it to reflect the full transport requirement.

• Special Instructions: Optional box for supplier notes.

Cancelling an Order

• Use the Cancel Order button to cancel a trip.
  

• If the order is a Single Trip, the entire order is cancelled.

• If not, the trip number (e.g., /6) won’t be reused.

• A cancellation reason is required and logged.

• If you cancel the contract before confirming, you must manually cancel the order first.
  

Printing Transport Orders

• Use Print to generate a copy for a specific trip.
  

• To modify order text, use the Syrinx Configuration tool.

Querying and Managing Orders

Query Purchase Order Screen

1. Use the Type drop-down to filter for Transport Orders.

2. View the order header and all associated trips.

3. Use View to open trip details.
   
    

4. For multiple-trip orders:

   • Print provides a summary of all trips.

   • To print an individual trip, View the trip first, then click Print.
     

Open Transport Orders Screen

• Located under Purchase Orders > Open Transport Orders.

• Displays:
  

  • Open Trips: Linked to unconfirmed contracts.

  • Open Orders: Still accepting trips (no customer/description shown).

• Use Close Order to stop adding trips to an open order.

• Use View Order:

  • For trips: opens trip details (read-only).

  • For open orders: opens Query Purchase Order showing trip list and order end date.

Entering Purchase Invoices

Use the ‘Enter Cross Hire/Transport Invoice’ screen to enter purchase invoices against transport orders.  You enter the order number, and the details of that order are displayed for confirmation:

When you press OK, the ‘Enter Transport Invoice’ screen is displayed:

The first tab may be used to check the trips entered against the given order number. The second tab may be used to enter the invoice summary details:

Summary

If you use external suppliers to transport your hire equipment to and from customer sites (either for all or some of your hires) then you can raise purchase orders for transportation directly from the ‘Enter Hire Contract’ and ‘Off Hire’ screens.  Purchase invoices can be entered and linked back to the order, to allow cross checking of the invoice to the order.

Transport Orders can also be raised for Advice Notes, Site Movements, Depot Transfers, and Hire Exchanges.

Suppliers

On the ‘Transport’ tab of the ‘Amend Suppliers’ screen tick the ‘Supplies Transport’ box to indicate that the supplier provides transportation:

There are some important options that govern how transport orders will be created for each supplier.

For the Order Duration drop-down, select from:

The Order Pricing Method setting should normally be left as ‘Per Trip’.  However, if your contract with your supplier is such that a fixed price is to be paid for a given period (regardless of the number of trips undertaken during that period) then select ‘Per Order’.  In this case, you should also set the agreed price for each period.  If the pricing method is ‘Per Trip’ then the agreed price should be left blank, to indicate that each trip is negotiated separately and entered on each order.

The ‘Multi-Depot Orders?’ setting indicates whether or not different depots can add to the same order number.

If a supplier has more than one branch, the ‘Multi-Branch Orders?’ setting indicates whether or not trips undertaken by different supplier branches can be added to the same order number.

How to start a new Order

Transport Orders are raised directly from the screen for which the transportation is required:

Note: To open an existing order, follow the same procedure described above – the system will detect that an order has already been raised, and will bring up the details of that order.

Raising the Order

When you press the ‘Transport Order’ button, you will be asked to pick a supplier.  The supplier list will be limited to only those suppliers that are flagged as ‘Supplies Transport’.  Having picked the supplier, the system shows the details of that supplier, and lets you pick the supplier contact:

To switch to a different supplier, use the ‘…’ button at the top right of the screen.  If this trip will be added to an existing order number (according to the options set on the supplier), then the order number is shown on the screen.  Conversely, if the Order No field is blank, then a new order number will be allocated for this trip.

After picking the contact that you have placed the order with, press OK and the new order is created and displayed:

If the supplier’s ‘Order Duration’ is not set to ‘Single Trip’ (i.e. if multiple trips can be added to the same order number) then the order number has a unique number added to the end.  In this example the order number of ‘R278/6’ indicates that this is the sixth trip to be added to the order number ‘R278’.

The Date, Time and From / To sites will be populated automatically from the source contract.  The Equipment description is set from the description of the first item added to the contract, but should be amended on this screen to describe (to your supplier) what equipment needs to be transported.

There is a box for special instructions that can be printed on the purchase order sent to your supplier.

Order Cancellation

The ‘Cancel Order’ button will mark this particular trip as cancelled, and if there are no other trips on that particular order number (for example if the supplier’s order duration is set to ‘Single Trip’), then the order number itself will also be cancelled.  If there are other trips on this order number, then the trip number (i.e. the ‘/6’ at the end of the order number) will not be re-used by any further trips added later to this order number.  To cancel an order, you must enter a reason for cancellation, and these details are saved against the cancelled trip.

Note that if an order is raised against a contract, and if you decide to cancel the contract before it is confirmed, then you will be required to manually cancel the order first:

Printing Transport Orders

The Print button will print an order for that particular trip:

The standard wording on the order may be amended by using the Syrinx Configuration program.

Query Purchase Order

To find transport orders, use the ‘Type’ drop-down on the ‘Query Purchase Order’ screen:

Transport orders are shown in two parts – the order number header, plus the trip(s) that have been allocated to that order:

For a single trip order, there will only ever be a single trip shown against the order number (as shown above).  The ‘View’ button beneath the trip(s) can be used to bring up the full details of the selected trip.

The Print button will, for single trip orders, print the order for the trip (as shown earlier).  For multiple trip orders, the Print button will produce a summary sheet of all the trips against that order number:

In this situation, to print the order for a particular trip you must first press the View button, then press the Print button on the detail window.

Open Transport Orders

The Purchase Orders menu has an option ‘Open Transport Orders’ that can be used to view the on-going transport orders:

There are two types of entry shown in the list

• orders for particular trips (shown with the corresponding customer, description), and
• order numbers that are currently open, and against which new trips can still be added against (shown with a blank customer, description).

An order for a trip is shown as ‘Open’ if the contract it is for is still unconfirmed.  As soon as a contract, advice note, etc is confirmed, any associated transport order trip is closed automatically.  Therefore this screen shows individual transport order trips where the corresponding contract, off hire, etc is still unconfirmed.

An order number is shown as ‘Open’ if it is still OK to add further trips to it.  You can use the ‘Close Order’ button to close off the order number manually.

The ‘View Order’ button will, for a trip entry, show a read-only view of that trip.  For the order number entry, it will bring up the ‘Query Purchase Order’ screen, which shows the date that the order remains open to, and the set of trips that have been added to the order so far:

Enter Purchase Invoice

Use the ‘Enter Cross Hire/Transport Invoice’ screen to enter purchase invoices against transport orders.  You enter the order number, and the details of that order are displayed for confirmation:

When you press OK, the ‘Enter Transport Invoice’ screen is displayed:

The first tab may be used to check the set of trips that were entered against the given order number.  The second tab may be used to enter the invoice summary details: