Units and rebuilds

A dispatch unit is a truck plus the people on it — the thing you actually assign a run to. It is not a vehicle record: a vehicle is an asset, and the same prime mover is a different unit on Tuesday with a different driver and a different trailer behind it.

Most days you will not build one. The Dispatch Units column loads already populated with the preset units on the register, and choosing between trucks that already exist is the normal case.

Building a unit

+ Build Unit, at the top of the Dispatch Units column.

Start from a configuration (optional)

Picking one of Fleet’s transport configurations lays out the slots that shape expects — prime mover, B-lead, B-rear — and the vehicle picker suggests assets that fit.

It is a guide, not a gate. Every slot still takes whatever you put in it, and you can ignore the row entirely and build freehand. The configurations come from the same catalogue Fleet maintains, so dispatch never keeps a second list of what a B-double looks like.

The slots

• Vehicle — search by rego, make or type. Add more to build a combination; reorder them with the arrows, remove one with the ✕.
• Driver, Co-driver, Crew — a person in each slot, with a role.
• Unit name — generated for you (something like Dave — 14 pallet rigid). Click the pencil to write your own.
• Unit type and Vehicle type — who owns the truck, and what it is.

Crew roles, and why they are distinct

Role	Meaning
Primary	The driver on the runsheet. A unit has at most one.
Secondary	The second half of a two-up crew — a real driver taking real shifts.
Trainee	Aboard and being assessed. Not an answer to “who can legally drive this”.
Crew	The offsider, the jockey, the second pair of hands. May hold no licence at all, and asking for one is a category error.

A two-up unit gets a 2-up badge on its card.

Availability

The dropdown on each unit card. Five values, and only the first two let you give the unit work:

Availability	Meaning
Active	Out working right now.
Idle	On duty, free, and available to take work.
Off duty	Rostered off — end of shift, or out of hours under fatigue rules. Comes back by itself.
Unavailable	On the register but cannot work today — leave, maintenance, breakdown. Somebody has to clear this one.
Retired	Off the register, and off this board.

Availability is a different question from whether the unit is on a run. Both are shown, side by side, and the counts in the column header keep them apart.

Rebuilding a unit

A combination is not fixed for the day. A trailer gets swapped at a depot, a prime mover breaks down and another one takes the load, two drivers meet at a roadhouse and exchange trailers. Rebuild on the unit card records what changed.

The Rebuild drawer is the same combination builder used to create the unit, in a different mode — plus three questions that only apply to a change:

Field	Why it is asked
When did it happen?	The time on the road, not the time you typed it up. Leave it blank and the system records the time you saved, and marks it as such.
Where?	Yard, depot, roadhouse.
Why?	Swapping equipment, Breakdown, Needed different capacity, Relay / changeover, Maintenance, Other.

⚠️ “Relay / changeover” here is a reason, not a changeover. Picking it records that this trailer came off because of a relay. It does not create the relay: it does not link the two runs, and it produces nothing a driver signs. Splitting a run across two manifests so drivers can exchange trailers at a midpoint is a separate feature that does not exist yet. | Notes | Anything else worth having later. |

Declared or recorded

Every entry in a unit’s build history is badged one of two ways, and they are not a strong/weak pair — they answer different questions:

• Declared — a person stated when this happened. A trailer swapped at 03:40 and typed up at 09:00 is stamped 03:40, declared.
• Recorded — this is when the change was saved. A rebuild entered in the yard as it happens is honestly stamped now, recorded.

The distinction matters the moment anyone asks what was this truck carrying at 4am. Only a human can supply the first, so the system never manufactures one.

The mid-run rule

⛔ A unit that is out on a dispatched or in-transit run may only be rebuilt with both a time and a place.

Rebuilding a moving truck without them would silently rewrite what that run has been carrying, and the history would no longer be able to answer what the combination was at any given moment. The drawer shows a warning when the unit is live, and the save is refused until both fields are filled — with a message naming the manifest and when it started.

Moving a part from one unit to another

Put a trailer that another unit is currently holding into this one, and it is taken off the other unit in the same operation. Both units get a build entry; neither ends up with the trailer on both, and there is no moment where it is on neither.

The source unit is guarded exactly as the target is: taking a trailer off a truck that is out on a run needs the same when and where.

The build history

The Rebuild drawer lists everything recorded for that unit, newest first: what kind of change it was, what the combination was before and what it became, the time with its declared or recorded badge, the pallet capacity on either side of the change, where it happened, and — when a part came from another unit — which unit it came from.

Above the list is the date the record starts. That line matters more than it looks: without it the oldest entry reads as the unit’s beginning, and a unit rebuilt twice before recording began would look like one that had never been touched. If nothing has been recorded for a unit at all, the drawer says so in as many words — anything before that date is unknown, not unchanged.