Dangerous goods

Dangerous goods are captured per freight item, not per booking. One pallet on a consignment can be Class 3 while the rest of it is ordinary freight, and that is the level at which the questions get asked.

On a booking

Each freight row on the Create Booking form has a DG switch. Turn it on and a panel opens under that row:

Field
DG Class	The primary class — the one that decides how this item is handled.
Type	Packed or bulk. iDrv4 requires it whenever a class is set, and it selects which of the two DG levy add-ons applies.
UN #	The UN number, e.g. 1203.
Subsidiary risks	Other classes this item also presents. Click to open the picker, tick as many as apply, and the button lists what you chose.

The primary class is never offered in the subsidiary picker — an item cannot be its own subsidiary risk, so the option is removed rather than left there to be chosen by mistake.

Every freight row carries its own DG switch, including the first one the form starts with.

What DG does downstream

• It can add a DG levy to the price — see below.
• The class and type are forwarded to iDrv4 with the consignment, which is what makes the placard print on the connote, the driver’s licence get checked, and the DG line reach the invoice.
• It drives segregation in the dispatch load plan — dangerous goods are kept away from ordinary freight, and two different DG classes are never placed on the same deck.
• A unit carrying DG shows a DG badge on the dispatch board, with its licence expiry.

What it does to the price

Two levies exist — one for packed and one for bulk — and which applies is decided by the Type on the freight row, not by anyone remembering to add it.

They are off unless somebody has switched them on for that customer or rate card. Turning one on is done on the addon or rate card screen, the same way as any other charge: set its trigger to automatic, and scope it to a customer, to a rate card, or to everyone. Nothing is charged automatically until you do.

A booking carrying both packed and bulk freight matches both levies, and will attract both if both are configured that way.

Dangerous Goods Handling is a separate flat fee, not a levy. It stays a manual choice on any booking.

One thing you will notice straight away: the two levies no longer appear in the add-on picker on a booking with no dangerous freight. A DG levy on ordinary freight is a mistake rather than an option, so they only offer themselves when the freight is actually flagged.

What does not reach iDrv4

iDrv4 holds one DG class per consignment and has no field at all for a subsidiary risk. So two things stay behind at that boundary:

• subsidiary risks — always, however few;
• a second class, when one booking carries packages of two different classes. The first dangerous item in freight order is the one that crosses.

Neither is dropped quietly. The booking records what stayed behind, and you are told at the moment you forward — something like “Not sent to iDrv4: subsidiary risk class 8 on Solvent (iDrv4 has no field for it).” If you fix the booking and re-send, the note goes away.

Nothing is withheld to avoid an imperfect record: a load described incompletely in iDrv4 is a problem, but a dangerous load described there as ordinary freight is a worse one.

The registers

Settings → Dangerous Goods maintains the two reference lists behind those fields. Both are shared with iDrv4, and until now neither had a screen in either system — the class list has existed in the database since 2017 and nothing had ever read it.

Classes

The ADG classes, grouped by class number. A class with several divisions shows them nested under a heading; a class with a single division is just its own row, because “Class 3” written above one row called “Class 3” is noise.

Each row has an editable name and description, and a switch controlling whether it is offered on bookings. Show disabled reveals the ones currently switched off.

Types

Packed or bulk — the axis iDrv4 records on every dangerous connote and prices from. The two seeded rows came from iDrv4’s own list: the ids are confirmed, the names are this system’s rendering of them. If iDrv4 words them differently, correct them here.

⛔ The ids are a shared vocabulary

This is the one thing to know before editing either register.

iDrv4 stores the class id and type id against every dangerous consignment, and validates the class against these exact rows. Onyx and iDrv4 agree what “class 5.1” means because they agree it is a particular id.

So:

• Wording and availability are safe to change. Renaming a class or switching one off changes nothing about existing records.
• Ids are not safe to change, and there is no way to change them from this screen.
• There is no delete. A class that should not be offered is disabled. That is what iDrv4 itself already does with Explosives and Radioactive Materials, and it is what keeps every historical consignment pointing at a row that still exists.
• New class rows are not accepted. A sixteenth class would be rejected the moment a consignment carrying it reached iDrv4, which is exactly why the ADG divisions are grouped by a column rather than given rows of their own.