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 of the story. This article is about the other side — what happens when you dispatch, and everything across Nash that shapes the result.

How it works

When you dispatch an order, Nash gathers quotes from the providers that are eligible for that pickup and drop-off, alongside any of your own fleet that can carry it. Each quote is a provider saying "I can take this, at this price, in this window." A provider is then selected — either automatically, following the order's dispatch strategy, or by you picking a quote by hand in the Assign Provider drawer — and the order becomes a job assigned to whoever won. From that point the job is the live record: it breaks into a pickup and a drop-off, and each step's progress is what your customer sees as tracking.

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

You can reach that same outcome several ways, and they all end in a job:

• Dispatch sends a Ready to Dispatch order straight to a job using the strategy already attached to it — no drawer, no quote-picking.
• Assign Provider opens the quotes drawer so you can review the returned quotes and choose one yourself, optionally dispatching in the same step.
• Autodispatch lets the order's dispatch strategy select and send automatically, without you choosing a provider.
• Dispatching a route sends every order on it together, as one unit.

The run-it detail for each lives in its own how-to: dispatch an order and dispatch a route. What the rest of this article explains is why two orders that look identical on their form can dispatch to different providers at different prices — because the inputs that decide that don't live on the order.

What shapes a dispatch

Most of what determines which provider gets an order, and at what price, is standing configuration set elsewhere in Nash — not fields you fill in on the order each time. These inputs shape a dispatch in two ways: they gate which contracts are eligible to carry the order, and they set the price of each eligible option. Once the eligible set and their prices are known, the dispatch strategy makes the final choice among them. Each input below has its own home; this table names what it is, where it's set, and what it does when you dispatch.

Input	Where it's set	What it does here
Dispatch strategy	Automate ▸ Strategies — see dispatch strategies	Makes the final provider choice among the eligible options, applying its rules, when you Dispatch or Autodispatch an order.
Providers & contracts	Configure ▸ Network ▸ Providers — see manage providers	Every contract controls eligibility the same way — whether a provider can carry this order — and sets its price. Some contract prices are calculated by Nash; others come back from a real-time call to the provider. If that call errors, Nash treats the contract as not eligible for this dispatch, even if it would otherwise qualify.
Your own fleet & driver groups	Configure ▸ Fleet — see manage driver groups	Let you assign an order to your own drivers, surfaced as a quote in the same Assign Provider drawer. If several driver groups are eligible, Nash collapses them into one eligible option, using the least-expensive as the tie-breaker.
Zones & coverage	Configure ▸ Network ▸ Zones — see manage zones and define zone coverage	Set where providers operate, which determines which providers are eligible for an order's pickup and drop-off — and so which quotes appear.
Organization defaults	Settings ▸ Preferences	Currency, units, and time zone shape how quotes and times are displayed — not which provider wins.

These combine to determine which provider gets the order and at what price: the inputs gate eligibility and set prices, and the strategy chooses from what's left. No single one of them is a field you set on the order the moment you dispatch; they're the configuration behind it, resolved together at the instant the quotes come back. That's why troubleshooting a dispatch sometimes means leaving the order screen entirely — if no provider covers the zone, or the strategy has no eligible providers left in it, the order can still look perfectly valid while the problem lives one layer out in the configuration behind it.

Note

Some of these settings live in sections 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.