Dispatch a route

Dispatching is the step that turns a draft route into work that actually goes out. Everything up to this point — building the route, assigning who runs it, reoptimizing, adjusting stops — is reversible. Dispatch isn't. There are two ways to do it, depending on whether you're sending one route or several at once, and they don't behave quite the same way.

Before you dispatch

A route can sit as a draft indefinitely, but dispatch expects it to be finished: its stops in the order you want them run, and someone lined up to run it — an outside provider, or your own vehicle and driver. Reshaping stops or changing the assignment is Edit a route's job, not this article's; by the time you're looking at Dispatch, that work should already be done. A route needs an assignment — a provider, or your own vehicle and driver — before it can go out, so confirm that's set before you dispatch.

Dispatch one route

Open the route from the Routes tab and choose Dispatch in its drawer. This sends the route out immediately — the action runs synchronously, so by the time it completes, the route is dispatched. There's no waiting or background processing to check back on; you'll see the result right away.

Use this when you're finishing up a single route you've been reviewing or assembling in its drawer — you've reordered the stops, run Calculate Timing, assigned a provider or your own driver and vehicle, and you're ready to send it. It's also the version you reach for when a route needs a last look before it goes: open the drawer, confirm the stops and assignment look right, then dispatch from right there.

Dispatch several routes at once

From the Routes tab itself, select multiple routes and choose Dispatch Routes. Unlike dispatching a single route, this runs in the background — it queues the work rather than completing it on the spot, so it may take a moment to finish. You don't need to keep the tab open or wait it out; each route's status updates once it's gone out, and you can keep working the Routes tab while the queued dispatches finish behind the scenes.

Use this when you've got a group of routes ready together — say, everything built or optimized for a shift — and you'd rather send them all in one action than open each drawer individually. It trades the one-by-one review of the single-route path for speed: select the routes you've already confirmed are ready, and let dispatch work through the list on its own.

What dispatch produces

Whichever way you dispatch, the result is the same kind of thing. Dispatching a route turns the whole group into one batch job — a single job that carries all of the route's stops, the same way dispatching a single order turns that order into one job. The route doesn't disappear; it now points at the job dispatch created, and that job is what moves through delivery from here — it's the live record a driver works against and the thing your customer's tracking follows, not the route drawer itself.

This holds whether you dispatched one route by hand or several at once through Dispatch Routes: every route that goes out, however you sent it, becomes exactly one batch job. Dispatching several routes together doesn't produce smaller or different jobs than dispatching one does — the only difference between the two is whether dispatch finishes on the spot or in the background.

Dispatch hands the route off — Nash dispatches it, but a provider or your own fleet is the one that actually carries it and completes the delivery.

Dispatch locks the route

Once a route is dispatched, its structural actions lock: Calculate Timing, Split, Reoptimize, and Dispatch itself all disable, since a dispatched route can't be reshaped or sent out a second time. This is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the UI, so there's no workaround for editing a route's structure after it's gone out.

Make sure a route is assigned — provider, or your own vehicle and driver — and its stops are in the order you want before you dispatch; see Edit a route for reshaping stops and assignment while the route is still a draft. For the fuller picture of what editable-then-locked means and how a route relates to the orders and job behind it, see How routes work.

Availability

The Routes tab and its dispatch actions depend on whether your organization has routes enabled. If you don't see a Routes tab, availability varies by org — reach out to Nash.