Notes from the round
What we have learned from businesses running deliveries every day — and what the software does about it.
Inter-Station Accounts: How Transport Addas Settle What They Owe Each Other
When one station collects freight or pays a driver on another's behalf, it creates a balance between them. Here is how to keep that balance visible and settle it every week.
A Delivery App Your Drivers Can Read: English and Urdu on the Round
The office picks the software; the driver is the one who types into it, at a door, in a hurry. Why the language on the driver's screen decides whether the record is any good.
Short, Damaged or Missing: Stopping Cargo Loss Between Loading and Delivery
Cargo goes missing in the gaps between counts. Count at booking, at loading, at unloading and at handover — and record every difference against a bilty and a vehicle.
Running a 5-Gallon Water Delivery Business in the Gulf: The Operations Checklist
Licences and water quality are for the authorities to approve. This is the other half: the seven records a 5-gallon delivery business needs from its first week, and what goes wrong without each.
Bilty Tracking by SMS and WhatsApp: What Your Customers Expect Now
Senders and receivers now expect a message when goods are booked, dispatched and arrive, and a page to check the bilty. Here is how to give them that without flooding your phone lines.
Planning for Summer Demand in a Gulf Water Delivery Round
Summer does not arrive as a surprise, but it is planned for as if it did. How to use last year's own round to decide this year's bottles, loads and drivers.
How to Choose Goods Transport Software in Pakistan: A Buyer's Checklist
Twelve questions to ask any goods transport or bilty software before you buy — from To-Pay and inter-station accounts to SMS rules, stations, cost and leaving.
From Registers to Software: Moving a Goods Transport Company Over in 30 Days
A four-week plan for moving a multi-station goods transport company from carbon bilty books and registers to software — without stopping the counter for a day.
How to Choose Water Delivery Software in Pakistan: A Buyer's Checklist
Ten questions to ask any water delivery software before you pay for it — starting with the one most products get wrong: whether it can tell you where every 19 litre bottle is.
What we write about
Delivery operations, specifically — not software marketing. Everything here comes out of running rounds and out of what suppliers tell us goes wrong: bottles that do not come back, cash that reconciles a month late, monthly bills that take four days, and customers who quietly slip to ninety days overdue.
The writing is organised around four problems, and most suppliers arrive with one of them:
- Bottles and deposits. Tracking returnable containers as a per-customer balance, sizing deposits against actual holdings, and cutting losses that most suppliers have simply accepted as normal. Start here.
- Routes and riders. Why density beats distance, when to split a route, and what a rider's day has to look like for the plan to survive contact with it. Read the route guide.
- Money. Working out a true cost per delivered bottle, setting rate tiers that hold, and collecting what you are already owed before it ages past collectable. Pricing and recovery.
- Starting out. What a water delivery business in Pakistan actually costs to open, in what order to spend, and the three mistakes that close most new suppliers inside two years. The startup guide.
If a term in any of these is unfamiliar, the glossary defines the vocabulary of a delivery round properly. If you would rather ask a question than read one, the FAQ answers the twenty-three that come up most, and we answer email.