Agency-to-Agency Shipments Guide

An agency-to-agency shipment goes counter to counter: the customer drops it off at one of your offices and the recipient picks it up at another. No one picks up or delivers to an address.

1. Initial setup

These four steps are done only once. Without them, the office-to-office shipping option doesn’t appear when creating an order.

Step 1 · Enable the Agencies module

Go to Organization → System and turn on the Agencies toggle.

It comes off by default. While it’s off, order creation works exactly as always: no new option is visible.

Step 2 · Register your offices

Under Agencies → Agency network, register at least two. For an office to be usable for this shipment type, it has to meet all four conditions:

If any of the four is missing, that office simply won’t show up in the selectors.

The zone is the one most often forgotten. Without a zone, the system doesn’t know which rate to apply, so the office stays invisible to this service even if everything else is fine.

Step 3 · Create counter rates

Under Rates, when creating or editing a rule you’ll see the Delivery mode field with four options:

The last two appear in the list but can’t be chosen yet.

All your current rates were marked as Door to door and keep working exactly the same. To sell counter shipments, you have to create new rates with the Agency to agency mode.

This is the most important part of the setup, and also the easiest to underestimate:

The system never charges a door-to-door rate on a counter shipment. If there’s no agency-to-agency rate for that route, the shipment can’t be created. There’s no fallback or approximation: we’d rather it not sell than sell with the wrong charge.

When a rate is missing, the error message tells you which route is needed, with the name and code of both zones, so you can request or create it without guessing.

The “Available for pickup” status creates itself. When you turn on the Agencies toggle, your organization automatically gets the shipment status representing “the package is waiting at the destination counter,” placed right before “Delivered.” You don’t have to create or configure it.

If for some reason it’s missing, you’ll see a notice under Agencies and Agencies → Pickup queue with a direct link to fix it.

Step 4 · Set the pickup deadline

Under Organization → System, with the Agencies module on, the Pickup deadline (days) field appears.

• Default value: 10 days
• Allowed range: 1 to 90 days

It’s how long you keep a package at the destination counter before considering it overdue. The deadline starts counting the day the package arrives at the destination office.

The deadline expiring doesn’t do anything on its own. The package doesn’t get returned, doesn’t change status, and no one is notified automatically. It simply appears marked in the pickup queue so your team can decide what to do. Returning it, if needed, is logged manually.

Step 5 · Decide whether your customers can create these themselves

Under Organization → System, below the Agencies toggle, there’s Allow customers to create agency-to-agency shipments. It comes off.

When you turn it on, your customers see the office-to-office shipping option in their creation wizard: they choose where they’ll drop off the package and where it will be picked up, and the price is calculated with your counter rates just as if you had created it.

The package doesn’t enter the network until your team confirms it. A shipment the customer creates stays pending: it shows its origin office, but no one has declared having it yet. When the person shows up with the package, whoever’s at the counter opens the order and clicks Confirm receipt. Only then does the shipment start moving.

This is intentional. If the shipment were considered received the moment the customer creates it from home, your system would be claiming a package is at a counter that no one has actually seen — and the first day one doesn’t show up, you wouldn’t know which ones really arrived.

What the customer can’t do is confirm their own drop-off: that action is only visible to your staff.

2. Creating an agency-to-agency shipment

It’s created from Orders → New order, the same wizard as always.

Choosing the offices

At the origin and destination step you’ll see the option to indicate, separately, whether each end is an address or an office.

Once you choose an office for one end, the other also has to be an office. Mixed shipments (an address and a counter) aren’t available yet.

Your office comes pre-selected based on which ones you’re assigned to:

When there’s a tie, the field is deliberately left blank: it’s better for you to choose than for the system to guess and have the package leave from the wrong counter.

You can change the origin to any available office, whether you’re assigned to it or not. The assignment only decides what’s pre-selected.

The selector has a search box, because a network can have hundreds of counters. The office you already chose for one end doesn’t appear for the other: a shipment from an office to itself isn’t a shipment.

The recipient’s details

For a counter shipment the recipient needs three required fields:

• Name
• Phone
• ID document number

No destination address is asked for. The destination is the office, and its address is copied in automatically.

The ID document is required because at the counter the package is handed over against ID to whoever shows up. The phone number is how you notify them their package arrived.

The price

It’s automatically quoted with the agency-to-agency rate for that route. Only service levels that have a counter rate configured for that route are offered to you.

If a service level has a door-to-door rate but not a counter one, it won’t appear among the options. That’s correct: you’re not selling it.

What still can’t be done

Cash on delivery (COD) isn’t available on agency-to-agency shipments. If you try to create one with cash on delivery, the system rejects it with a message explaining why.

3. What happens when you create the order

There’s an important difference from home-delivery shipments here:

The order is born already received. By the time you finish creating it, the package is physically sitting on your counter and gets logged as Received at origin agency at that very moment. You don’t have to log a second event for something that already happened.

In the order’s history you’ll see two separate facts, in this order: the order’s creation and the package’s receipt.

Also, the destination office’s address gets copied into the order. If that office moves next month, this order will keep the address it had on the day it was created — in the history, on the invoice, and on the label, which stays consistent with the one already printed.

4. The package’s journey

Two alternative outcomes, logged manually when needed: Returned to sender and Cancelled before pickup.

“Available for pickup” is not “Delivered”

This is the key distinction of this service. While the package waits at the counter:

• It doesn’t count as delivered in your reports or metrics
• The shipment stays open and the package stays under your responsibility
• The order isn’t locked: events can still be logged for it

It’s only considered delivered when someone physically picks it up.

Logging arrival at destination

When the package arrives at the destination office, the Received at destination agency event is logged. It can be done in bulk, across many orders at once, since it doesn’t require capturing anything: the truck gets unloaded and everything is logged at once.

The fastest way is the Counter Scanner in the mobile app: you choose your office once and scan the packages as they come off the truck, without having to sort them yourself — the system decides what each arrival means:

• A counter package addressed to your office ends up Available for pickup.
• A newly created package that the sender drops off at your origin office ends up Received.
• A home-delivery package that’s merely passing through your facility gets logged as a pass-through at the distribution hub.
• A counter package addressed to another office triggers a misrouting alert with the correct office, so you can set it aside while the parcel is still in your hand — nothing gets logged.
• Scanning the same package twice doesn’t duplicate anything, and an already-delivered package is rejected.

Each scan also silently and automatically saves the phone’s location — it doesn’t interrupt scanning even if there’s no location signal.

At the moment of arrival, the system calculates the pickup deadline by adding the configured period. If the package is scanned again days later, the deadline doesn’t reset: the first arrival always governs, so as not to steal days off the recipient’s deadline.

Logging the pickup

It’s done one at a time, because each pickup has a different person and ID document. Two paths:

• Web panel: the Counter pickup queue.
• Mobile app: when scanning a package that’s already waiting for pickup, the scanner shows the Log pickup button, which opens the full form: name and ID of whoever’s picking it up (if the shipment carries the recipient’s ID document, it’s shown so you can compare), mandatory signature from whoever takes the package, optional photo, and the payment if the shipment carries one. On save, the package becomes Delivered.

5. The label

A counter shipment carries a different label, designed so no one puts it on a delivery route by mistake:

• A black band at the header with the text PICKUP AT AGENCY, readable from a meter away, and a notice that it’s not delivered to an address
• The destination office’s name as the label’s most prominent piece of information
• The office code, which is what’s read to choose a bin or route
• The destination office’s phone and address — the label’s contact details are always the office’s
• The recipient on an “attention of” line, below the address
• The origin office at the bottom, so the parcel can be returned or rerouted without checking the system

Privacy: the only personal detail on a counter label is the name of whoever picks it up. Neither the phone number, nor the address, nor the recipient’s ID travel printed on the package — the label goes across your entire office network and that information isn’t needed by anyone along the way.

A home-delivery shipment’s label hasn’t changed at all: same elements, same positions, same sizes, same barcode. You can print a batch with both shipment types mixed and each label will come out in the format that applies to it.

6. Finding your counter shipments

In the Orders list, the filters panel includes Delivery mode, with the options Door to door and Agency to agency. The list also visually distinguishes between them.

Useful links

• Counter pickup queue
• Frequently asked questions
• Agencies guide — registering and managing your offices
• How rates work