Routes at a glance

A route is a group of stops — pickups, drop-offs, returns — that go out together, typically to one driver or provider, as a single dispatch. You build a route by grouping orders yourself or by letting Nash optimize a set of orders into one or more routes for you. Either way, 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.

That's the spine worth carrying into everything else on this route: an order is grouped into a route before it goes out, the order carries its route membership while it's still a plan, and the moment you dispatch the route, all of it becomes a single piece of work in progress. Right up until that point, a route — like an order — is something you can still change: add or remove a stop, reorder them, hand it to a different driver. Once dispatched, it locks.

Routes live on the Routes tab of the Orders page, alongside your regular order list. It's an org-dependent feature — availability varies by organization, so if you don't see a Routes tab, reach out to Nash about access.

What you can do with routes

• Build a route from orders — group the orders you want into a route yourself, with Create Route.
• Optimize orders into routes — hand a set of orders to Nash's optimizer and let it work out the grouping, sequence, and contract, then save the result as routes.
• Edit a route — reshape a route's stops: add, remove, reorder, move between routes, or split.
• Assign a route — decide who runs it, an outside provider or your own vehicle and driver.
• Reoptimize a route — re-solve the stop order after you've changed it, and recalculate its timing.
• Dispatch a route — send a route out, one at a time or several at once.
• Archive and find routes — set routes aside once you're done with them, and filter routed work from the orders that haven't been grouped yet.

Those cover a route's whole working life: it starts out as a group of orders you build or optimize, stays editable while you shape its stops and assignment, gets dispatched when it's ready, and eventually gets archived. Not every order needs to travel as part of a route — plenty go out on their own — but when one does, there's a dedicated place to build, edit, and send it.

Learn how it works

The task pages above tell you what to click. For the mechanics behind them — how a route relates to the orders inside it, what dispatch locks down, why a routed order can still show up in your regular order list — see How routes work. It walks through the object model, the editable-before/locked-after lifecycle, and the difference between building a route by hand and letting Nash optimize one for you.

For the details you'll want while you're actually working a route, see the Route fields reference — every field and column you can see and set on a route.

One thing worth carrying into all of this: Nash dispatches the route and hands it to a provider or your own fleet — Nash itself doesn't carry the delivery. What you're managing on this side is the group of stops and its status, not the drive itself.