Charge for transport on an order: shipping methods are not enabled here

9 min read Updated 2026-08-31 WindoorERP 19.0

What this does

Transport has to be paid for, and on window and door work it is rarely free: a crane day, a flatbed to a site an hour out of town, a second trip because the floor was not ready. This page is about putting that charge on the order where the customer can see it, instead of burying it in the unit price of the windows.

It is also the honest answer to a question people arrive with. WindoorERP has a Delivery Methods feature — named carriers with their own pricing rules, an Add shipping button that prices the transport and drops it onto the quotation as a line, and the chosen method carried through to the delivery order. That feature is not enabled on this system. The module behind it is not installed, so there is no Delivery Methods menu, no carrier records, no Add shipping button and no rate lookup. Earlier versions of this page described all of it as though it were there.

What follows is what you actually do, what enabling the feature would change, and how to ask for it. The four pages under this one go further: configuring a delivery method, invoicing the charge, printing the paperwork that travels with the goods, and the dispatch-planning layer.

Before you start

Agree the transport charge before the quotation goes out. Adding it after the customer has accepted is a conversation, not a click, and there is no automatic pricing here to hide behind.
Decide what the charge is for — a delivery, a trip, a crane day, a square metre of glass to an awkward floor. Whatever you choose becomes the unit on the line, and it is what you will have to explain later.
You need the ordinary right to edit a quotation. Nothing on this page needs a special group, because nothing on this page uses a module that is not installed.

Steps

Keep transport on its own line

A charge folded into the unit price of the windows moves whenever the quantity moves, which is almost never what was agreed. A separate service line is stable, it is visible on the document the customer signed, and it can be reported on: group the order-lines pivot by Product and your transport revenue is one row.

01
Create or reuse a service product for the charge — Delivery to site, Transport, Crane hire — with a sale price and a unit that matches how you sell it.
02
Open the quotation and add it in Order Lines as an ordinary line. Set the quantity and the price you agreed.
03
Give it a description the customer will recognise on the printed quotation: the site, the number of trips, what is included.
04
Confirm the order. The transport line behaves like every other line from then on: it prints, it is billed, and it appears in the order-lines list and its pivot alongside the goods.
05
Invoice it with the rest of the order. On a progressively billed contract it is claimed like any other line — Invoice the delivery charge covers that case in full.

What the order does carry about delivery

Even without the shipping module, a sales order is not silent about delivery. In Other Info you will find:

Field	What it is for
Delivery Address	Where the goods go, which may not be the invoicing address. Set it on the quotation, not on the day of the delivery.
Incoterm and Incoterm Location	The international commercial term and the place it refers to. This is where the answer to "who pays for carriage" is recorded contractually, and it is the closest thing this system has to a delivery-terms field. It prices nothing.
Shipping Policy	Either As soon as possible or When all products are ready. It decides whether the warehouse may ship in pieces or waits for the whole order — a real transport decision, since a split shipment is usually a second charge.
Delivery Date, Expected Date, Effective Date	The promise, the calculation and the first completed delivery.
Delivery Status	Not Delivered, Started, Partially Delivered or Fully Delivered, shown only on confirmed orders. It is blank when the order has no transfers at all, which on fabricated work is common — see Track order deadlines and fulfilment status.
The Delivery smart button	Opens the transfers raised by the order, where the operators record what actually left.

None of these carries money. Transfers move goods; the charge lives on the sales order as a line, and that separation is the whole shape of delivery billing on this fleet.

What enabling Delivery Methods would add

Traced from the module itself, so you can judge whether it is worth asking for:

A Shipping Methods configuration screen. Each method has a name, a delivery product, a provider — Fixed Price or Based on Rules in the base module, with third-party carrier connectors adding their own — and an Invoicing Policy whose only option in this release is Estimated cost.
Pricing rules for the Based on Rules methods: a table of conditions on Weight, Volume, Weight * Volume, Price or Quantity, each producing a base price plus a rate.
Availability limits per method — countries, states, postcode prefixes, a maximum weight and a maximum volume, and product tags a method must or must not carry — plus a percentage and a fixed margin added to the computed price — both ignored on a Fixed Price method — and a free if the order is above threshold.
An Add shipping button under the order lines, which opens a small dialog holding the Delivery Method, the Total Order Weight pre-filled from the product weights and editable, and the computed Cost. Confirming with Add inserts the method's delivery product as an order line at that price. Where a live carrier is connected, a Get rate button fetches the price instead; it does not appear for the two built-in providers.
An Update shipping cost button that replaces Add shipping once a method is set, and highlights the shipping line when the order changes enough for the price to be stale.
The method carried onto the delivery transfer, with carrier tracking fields and label-printing hooks on the operation type.

Product weights are the prerequisite nobody expects

Every rules-based price is computed from the order's total weight, and that comes from the weight on each product. On a catalogue where weights were never filled in, a weight-based tariff quietly returns zero. Enabling the feature is the easy half; populating weights on aluminium profiles, glass and accessories is the real work.

Asking for it

The switch is a checkbox — Sales › Configuration › Settings, under Shipping: Delivery Methods, described as "Compute shipping costs on orders". The same checkbox appears in the Inventory settings. Ticking it installs a module, which is an administrator decision and not something to try in order to see what happens.

Raise it with your WindoorERP administrator if you regularly quote transport by a tariff rather than by judgement, if you deliver through third-party carriers whose rates you want to look up, or if you need the charge to follow the load rather than a person's estimate. Say which of those it is: pricing on quotations and carrier integration on transfers are two layers, switched on together, and each brings configuration to maintain.

The rest of this section

Four pages sit under this one, and between them they cover the whole delivery surface — including the two capabilities that are not enabled, written out honestly rather than left blank.

Create a delivery method — the configuration screen this system does not have, and what it would contain.
Invoice the delivery charge — charging and billing transport as things stand, in detail.
Print delivery slips and labels — the paperwork that travels with the goods, which is fully available here.
Dispatch Management System — vehicles, docks and load building: another capability that is not enabled.

Troubleshooting

What you see	Why, and what to do
No Add shipping button under the order lines	Correct. It ships with the Delivery Methods module, which is not installed. Add a priced service line instead.
No Shipping Methods or Delivery Methods menu under Configuration	Same reason.
No Carrier field on the delivery transfer	Same reason. The transfer's own Vehicle and Route fields, used by the WinDoor Delivery Note, are a separate thing and are free text.
The delivery order shows no charge	It never will. Transfers move goods and carry no money on this system; the charge is a line on the sales order.
A customer disputes the transport charge	Because it is an ordinary line it is on the quotation they accepted. Point at that line, not at a rate table nobody can reproduce.
You cannot find where to enter a weight-based tariff	There is nowhere. Price the line.

Common mistakes

Burying transport in the unit price of the windows, so a quantity change silently changes the freight too.
Adding the charge after the order is confirmed and expecting it to pass unnoticed.
Waiting for a carrier integration that is not installed instead of pricing the line today.
Recording the delivery address on the day of the delivery rather than on the quotation, when the price was set.
Leaving Shipping Policy on As soon as possible for a job you priced as one trip, and paying for the second one yourself.
Reading a blank Delivery Status as "nothing has been delivered" on a fabricated contract that has no transfers at all.

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