How dispatch works

Dispatching is the moment an order stops being a plan and becomes live delivery work. You dispatch a Ready to Dispatch order — one at a time, in bulk, or through a route it belongs to — and Nash turns it into a job: the record a provider or your own fleet actually carries out. The order itself stays in place as the historical record; see how orders work for that side. This page is about the other side — what happens the instant you dispatch, why two orders that look identical can go to different providers at different prices, and what to do when a dispatch doesn't go through.

Nash dispatches; the provider or your own fleet performs the delivery. Nash's job is to gather quotes, apply your rules, pick a provider, and hand the work off — not to carry the delivery itself.

How it works

When you dispatch an order, Nash runs a short pipeline in one pass:

1. Creates a job. The order becomes a job — one order, one job — with the pickup and drop-off it needs to complete.
2. Gathers quotes. Nash asks every provider that could serve this pickup and drop-off — plus any of your own fleet that can carry it — for a quote. A quote is a provider saying "I can take this, at this price, arriving around then."
3. Gates who's eligible. Providers and contracts that can't legally or physically serve the order are dropped before they're even considered.
4. Prices each option. Every eligible option gets a price — some Nash calculates itself, some it fetches live from the provider.
5. Picks a provider. A winner is chosen — automatically by the order's dispatch strategy, or by you picking a quote by hand — and the job is assigned to whoever won.

From that point the job is the live record. Its progress — arriving at the pickup, collecting, driving, dropping off — is what your customer sees as tracking. See how deliveries work for the execution side.

The order's status moves from Ready to Dispatch to Dispatched, and that step is one-way: a dispatched order is frozen out of being dispatched again. If something goes wrong, you work the job from that point, not the order.

The dispatch decision, step by step

The reason two identical-looking orders can dispatch differently is that the inputs deciding it don't live on the order. They're resolved together, live, the instant the quotes come back. Three things happen in order: eligibility decides who can serve it, pricing sets what each option costs, and the dispatch strategy makes the final choice among what's left.

Who can serve it — eligibility

Before anyone is priced, Nash filters the field twice:

• Which providers. A provider is dropped if it isn't allowed by the order's dispatch strategy, if it can't handle a batch when the order is part of one, or if it can't meet the order's requirements at all. If your organization has no providers enabled, dispatch stops with "Couldn't find any providers for this job."
• Which of that provider's contracts. Each contract carries the real rules — and a contract is what actually quotes. A contract is ruled out when the order falls outside what it covers: outside its zone or coverage area, beyond its delivery radius, missing a required capability (refrigeration, a vehicle type, a package requirement), outside its lead time or time window, or outside its value, weight, or volume limits. A provider whose contracts all fail this check produces no quote and is skipped.

This is why a dispatch problem often lives outside the order screen: an order can look perfectly valid while no provider covers its zone, or the dispatch strategy has no eligible providers left in it.

What it costs — pricing

Every eligible option is priced, and there are two ways a price is set:

Price source	Where it comes from
Nash calculates it	From the contract's own terms — a flat rate, a formula, or a rate table — plus tolls and tax where they apply.
The provider returns it live	Nash makes a real-time call to the provider and uses the price it sends back.

Note

A live price call that errors doesn't make the contract permanently ineligible — it just means that provider failed to return a usable quote for this dispatch. The contract still passed eligibility; it simply didn't produce a price this time, so it isn't an option for this run. Try again and it may quote fine.

Two more things drop an option after it's priced: a price of zero (except for your own fleet, which is allowed to quote at no fee), and a price above the order's maximum delivery fee if one is set.

Who wins — selection

Once Nash has the eligible, priced options, the order's dispatch strategy makes the final choice. Different strategies optimize for different things — lowest price, a ranked list of preferred providers, reliability, a set percentage split across providers, or a dynamic fair-share objective. The full behavior of each lives in how dispatch strategies work; what matters here is that the strategy chooses from the eligible set, and it tries its top few candidates in order, falling through to the next if one fails to accept the job.

Your own fleet competes in the same pool: a driver group's option appears in the same list as third-party quotes. If several of your driver groups could take an order, Nash collapses them to a single candidate per provider before the strategy scores them, so your fleet is weighed as one option, not many.

You don't have to let the strategy decide. In the Assign Provider drawer you can review the returned quotes and pick one yourself — that pick becomes the winner the job dispatches to.

What happens when you dispatch

Under the hood, dispatch creates a job and moves it through a few states. You rarely see the internal names, but knowing the shape explains what you do see.

Stage	What it means
Created	The job and its stop exist; Nash is gathering quotes or waiting for you to pick one.
Held	A provider is chosen, but the delivery is held rather than sent — this is what happens to a scheduled order whose pickup is still far off. Nash releases it to the provider as the pickup window nears.
Running	The provider has accepted and the delivery is live. Only now is the work actually on a driver.
Dispatch failed	A provider was selected but couldn't be handed the work. A dispatch-failed job can be reassigned.

Important

Selecting a provider is not the same as the work being on a driver. For a scheduled order, Nash deliberately holds the chosen provider until the pickup is close enough — so a strategy can pick a winner well ahead of time without committing the delivery early. If a scheduled order looks "picked but not moving," that's usually this hold, working as intended.

There's also a common in-between state you do act on: if the order's dispatch strategy isn't set to send automatically, Nash creates the job, gathers the quotes, ranks the preferred one — and then waits for you. The job sits with quotes ready and no provider chosen until you open the Assign Provider drawer and pick one (or trigger auto-dispatch from there).

The ways to dispatch

Every path ends in a job; they differ in how much Nash decides for you.

• Dispatch creates the job using the strategy already attached to the order. Depending on that strategy, Nash may auto-select a provider, or leave the job waiting for you to pick a quote.
• Assign Provider opens the quotes drawer so you review the returned quotes and choose one yourself. A toggle there — Auto-dispatch immediately — lets you assign and send in the same step.
• Autodispatch hands the whole choice to the order's dispatch strategy: Nash creates the job and lets the strategy select and send, with no drawer. It's offered when an order has a dispatch strategy but no provider chosen yet.
• Dispatching a route sends every order on the route together as one unit.

The run-it steps for each live in their how-tos: dispatch an order and dispatch a route. Bulk dispatch works from the Ready to Dispatch tab and asks you to confirm before it sends.

The Assign Provider drawer

When you assign a provider by hand, the drawer lists the quotes that came back. Each row shows the provider, a drop-off ETA, and the price (the price column is hidden if your organization hides costs from operators). A star marks your top preferred provider, and preferred providers sort to the top.

The drawer keeps the quotes fresh — it refreshes on its own about every 30 seconds until a provider is chosen, and you can refresh by hand. A few states are worth recognizing:

• No quotes available. No provider returned a usable quote. A Show unavailable toggle reveals the ones that failed, each with a Failed badge whose tooltip is the provider's own error — often the fastest way to see why (no eligible contract, out of area, price too high).
• Failed and Expired quotes can't be selected; they're shown so you can diagnose, not dispatch.

Tip

When a dispatch won't go through, turn on Show unavailable first. The failed quotes and their error messages usually point straight at the cause — a coverage gap, a missing capability, or a price over your cap — without leaving the screen.

When a dispatch doesn't go through

Most dispatch trouble is one of a few shapes, and none of them lose the order — it stays recoverable until a provider actually accepts.

• No eligible providers. Nobody covers the order's lane, or the dispatch strategy's allowed providers are all ruled out. Nash can't produce quotes; check the zone/coverage and which providers the strategy allows.
• Quotes came back but none usable. Everyone errored, everyone was over your fee cap, or every contract was ineligible. The order isn't dispatched; open Assign Provider and use Show unavailable to read the reasons.
• Autodispatch couldn't pick. When a strategy runs automatically but finds no valid quote, the job is flagged and Nash alerts your team and (if configured) notifies the customer. The order stays put for you to pick a provider by hand.
• A provider was selected but dispatch failed. The job lands in dispatch failed and can be reassigned — some setups automatically retry the next-best quote, block the failed provider and re-quote, or fall over to a different dispatch strategy.
• You tried to dispatch a routed order on its own. An order that belongs to a route can't be dispatched individually (see below).

Routed orders appear in two places

A routed order keeps its Ready to Dispatch status until the route is dispatched, so it shows up in both the Ready to Dispatch list and the Routes tab. That's expected. To keep you from dispatching it twice, Nash removes the individual Dispatch action from a routed order and offers Remove from Route instead — you dispatch it through its route, or pull it out of the route first. Once a route is dispatched it can't be changed. See how routes work.

What affects this

Most of what decides which provider gets an order, and at what price, is standing configuration set elsewhere — not fields you fill in each time. Each input has its own home; this is what it does at the moment of dispatch.

Input	Where it's set	What it does here
Dispatch strategy	Orchestrate ▸ Dispatch Strategies — see dispatch strategies	Makes the final provider choice among the eligible, priced options when you Dispatch or Autodispatch.
Providers & contracts	Control ▸ Providers — see manage providers	Contracts gate eligibility (can this provider serve the order?) and set the price — calculated by Nash or fetched live.
Zones & coverage	Control ▸ Zones — see manage zones and define zone coverage	Set where providers operate, which decides who's eligible for the order's pickup and drop-off.
Your own fleet & driver groups	Fleet ▸ Driver Groups — see manage driver groups	Surface your own drivers as a quote in the same drawer; multiple eligible groups collapse to one option.
Optimization	Orchestrate ▸ Optimization Strategies — see how optimization works	Groups and sequences orders into routes before dispatch; a routed order dispatches through its route.
Organization defaults	Settings ▸ Preferences — see set organization defaults	Currency, units, and time zone shape how quotes and times are displayed, not who wins.

Because these resolve together at dispatch time, troubleshooting a dispatch often means leaving the order screen: the order can be valid while the problem lives one layer out in the configuration behind it.

Note

Some of these settings live in areas that are available depending on your organization's setup. If you don't see one, it may not be turned on for your organization — reach out to Nash.