Consignees

Consignees are your customers — the brand-owners on whose behalf you warehouse, stamp, and ship product. In EMS, every shipment, every product, every production order, and every outbound dispatch is tagged with a consignee. This consignee-awareness runs from intake to delivery, so you always know whose product you are handling and can report on it accordingly.

If you are a self-importer, you may have only one consignee (yourself). If you are a distributor or 3PL, you likely have dozens. Either way, setting up consignees correctly is one of the first things you should do when onboarding with EMS, because almost every other record in the system depends on a consignee being in place first.

Adding a consignee

To create a new consignee, navigate to the Consignees page and click + New Consignee. The creation form asks for the following fields:

• Code — a short alphanumeric identifier, maximum 20 characters. EMS auto-uppercases whatever you type, so "acme" becomes "ACME". The code must be unique across all consignees. This code appears throughout the system as a quick-reference label — on shipment cards, production orders, storage views, and reports.
• Company Name — the full legal or trading name of the consignee. This is the only required field besides Code.
• Contact Name — the primary point of contact at the consignee's organisation. Optional but recommended.
• Phone — phone number for the primary contact. Optional.
• Email — email address. This is used for portal access if you enable the customer portal for this consignee, so fill it in even if you don't plan to use the portal immediately.
• Primary Address — the consignee's main business address. Street, city, province/state, postal code, and country.
• Notes — free-text field for any additional context: billing preferences, special handling instructions, account manager assignments, or anything else your team should know.

Click Save to create the consignee. It appears in the list immediately and is available for selection when creating shipments, products, and production orders.

Managing multiple locations

Many consignees operate from more than one address — a head office, one or more distribution warehouses, retail locations, or satellite offices. EMS supports multiple addresses per consignee so you can ship to any of their locations without creating duplicate consignee records.

When you first create a consignee and enter an address, that address is automatically marked as the primary location. To add more locations:

1. Open the consignee's detail page.
2. Find the Locations card.
3. Click + Add Location.
4. Fill in the address fields:
   • Label — a descriptive name like "Head Office", "Toronto Warehouse", or "Vancouver DC"
   • Street
   • City
   • Province / State
   • Postal Code
   • Country
5. Click Save.

You can designate any address as the primary location by clicking the star icon next to it. The primary address is the default destination for outbound orders, but operators can override it on a per-order basis.

The consignee detail page

Clicking a consignee's name or code from the list page opens their detail page. This is the central hub for everything related to that customer. The page is organised into three tabs:

Overview tab

The overview shows the consignee's contact information, all saved locations, and the KPI summary cards (covered in the next section). This is the tab you land on by default, and it gives you a snapshot of who the consignee is and how active their account is.

Orders & Shipments tab

This tab shows three tables, each limited to the most recent 50 rows for performance:

• Production Orders — all POs tagged to this consignee, with status, scheduled date, and unit counts
• Outbound Orders — all outbound dispatches, with status, destination address, and ship date
• Inbound Shipments — all inbound shipments, with status, origin, and receiving date

Each table row is clickable — it takes you to the full detail page for that record. Use this tab to answer questions like "when was the last time we shipped to MAPLE?" or "does NORTH have any POs in production right now?"

Invoices tab

This tab is a placeholder for future invoicing functionality. It currently displays a message indicating that invoice management is coming soon. The tab is visible so you know it exists, but there is no data entry or display here yet.

Consignee KPIs

The overview tab of the consignee detail page includes a set of KPI cards that summarise the consignee's activity. These metrics are calculated from real data across all modules and update in real time.

• Units Stamped — the total number of units that have been stamped for this consignee, shown in four time windows: last 30 days, last 90 days, last 180 days, and last 365 days. This data comes from completed production orders. Use it to understand the consignee's volume trends — are they growing, stable, or declining?
• Average Dispatch Time — the mean number of days between a production order completing and the corresponding outbound order being dispatched. A low number means product moves off your floor quickly after stamping. A high number might indicate dispatch bottlenecks or consignee-side delays in arranging pickup.
• Inbound Shipments — the total count of inbound shipments associated with this consignee, across all statuses. This tells you how frequently they send product to your facility.
• Outbound Orders — the total count of outbound orders, giving you the flip side: how frequently product leaves your facility for this consignee.
• Completed Production Orders — the count of POs that have reached Completed status. Combined with Units Stamped, this tells you the consignee's average order size.

Pending Actions

The consignee list page has a Pending Actions tab that surfaces consignees with incomplete data. This is your cleanup checklist — it helps you find and fix records that are missing important information before that missing data causes problems downstream.

The Pending Actions view sorts consignees by the number of missing fields, with the most incomplete records at the top. Each consignee card in this view shows orange badges indicating what is missing — for example, "No email", "No address", or "No contact name".

Why this matters:

• A consignee without an email address cannot be given portal access
• A consignee without an address will cause problems when creating outbound orders (no default destination)
• A consignee without a contact name makes communication harder for your shipping and customer service teams

Click Edit on any card in the Pending Actions view to jump straight into the edit form and fill in the blanks. As you complete fields and save, the consignee's badge count decreases. When all required fields are filled, the consignee drops off the Pending Actions list entirely.

Editing consignees

You can edit a consignee from two places: the Edit button on their card in the list view, or the Edit button in the header of their detail page. Both open the same form.

All fields are editable, with one important constraint: the Code field must remain unique. If you change a code to something that another consignee already uses, EMS will reject the save and show a validation error. This uniqueness check happens in real time as you type, so you will see the conflict immediately.

When you save changes, they propagate throughout the system. If you update the company name, it changes on all associated shipment cards, production orders, and portal displays. The code is the internal key, so changing it is more impactful — any saved filters, bookmarks, or exported reports that reference the old code will need to be updated.

Deleting a consignee

Deleting a consignee is a soft-delete operation. The consignee record is deactivated and hidden from the list view, but it is not permanently destroyed. This protects your historical data — completed shipments and production orders that reference the consignee retain their integrity.

To delete a consignee:

1. Open the consignee's detail page.
2. Click Delete in the page header.
3. A confirmation dialog appears. It shows you the count of linked records that will be affected:
   • Number of shipments linked to this consignee
   • Number of products linked to this consignee
4. These linked records will have their consignee association removed — they will not be deleted, but they will no longer be associated with any consignee.
5. Click Confirm Delete to proceed.

Best practices

• Seed consignees before creating shipments. The first thing you should do when setting up a new EMS instance is create all of your consignee records. Every shipment, product, and PO requires a consignee, so having them in place first means you won't be interrupted mid-workflow to create one on the fly.
• Use consistent code formats. Decide on a naming convention and stick with it. A good pattern is the first four to six characters of the company name, uppercased. If you have consignees with similar names, add a numeric suffix: "MAPLE1" and "MAPLE2". Consistency makes searching and filtering faster.
• Complete the email and address fields early. Even if you don't plan to use the customer portal right away, fill in the email address during initial setup. When you do enable portal access later, you won't need to go back and update dozens of records. Similarly, having addresses on file means outbound orders can be created without manual address entry.
• Use the Pending Actions tab as your cleanup checklist. Make it a weekly habit to open the Pending Actions tab and work through the top three or four incomplete consignees. Keeping data complete upfront prevents downstream headaches — missing addresses stall outbound orders, missing emails block portal invitations, and missing contacts slow down communication.
• Review consignee KPIs quarterly. The detail page KPIs give you a per-customer health check. Are volumes trending up or down? Is dispatch time improving? Use these metrics to have informed conversations with your customers about their account and your service levels.
• Don't delete when you can deactivate. If a consignee stops doing business with you, consider leaving their record in place rather than deleting it. Their historical shipments, POs, and reports will retain their consignee association, which matters for audit trails and year-end reporting.