Tracking links

Coming soon

Tracking links are not available in RushHour yet. Everything on this page describes a feature that is being prepared, so don't plan work around it — the wording, the buttons and the options may still change before it arrives. This page will be rewritten as a normal guide once the feature is released.

What a tracking link is

A tracking link is a web address you can give to a customer so they can watch one order without a RushHour account and without signing in. Anyone who opens the link sees a single page for that one order.

The page is intended to show:

• Your company's name, logo, phone number and website, so the customer knows who is carrying the shipment.
• The order number and, when the order has one, the customer's own PO or reference.
• The order's overall status, and every pickup and delivery with its own status, planned date and time, and the times the driver actually arrived and left.
• An estimated arrival for the next stop, worked out from where the vehicle is now.
• A map with the stops it can place, the road between them, and — depending on your company's setting — where the vehicle is.

It is never meant to show prices, invoices, notes, item costs, your driver's name or anything else about the order. The link itself is the only credential: whoever holds it can open the page, so treat it like something you would forward to a customer, not like a password.

Before you start

• A Company Admin turns the feature on for your company in Settings → Tracking Links. Until then the actions below are hidden.
• You need the Manage tracking links permission to create, copy, email or revoke a link.
• Only real orders can be tracked. Quotes and drafts have nothing to follow, so they offer no link.

Create and copy a link

1. Open the order and go to its Tracking tab.
2. Select Create link and copy. RushHour creates the link and puts the address on your clipboard.
3. Paste it wherever you need it.

Once a link exists, the button becomes Copy and gives you the same address again. Asking for the link a second time does not create a second link — an order keeps one active link until it expires or you revoke it.

On the Dispatch board, the route card's ⋮ menu offers Copy Tracking Links, which prepares a link for every trackable order on the route at once and copies them all together.

Send the link by email

Next to Copy, a Send by email button emails the link for you.

1. Select Send by email. A window opens with the addresses RushHour suggests.
2. Choose the recipients. Suggestions come from the order's own contact and from the billing customer's email addresses and contacts, plus anyone this order's link was already sent to. The most likely recipients are ticked for you. You can remove any of them and type additional addresses.
3. Add a message if you want to. It is optional, and it appears in the email as its own short paragraph.
4. Select Send.

Points worth knowing:

• Each recipient gets their own email, so nobody sees who else received the link. There is a limit on how many addresses one send may carry, and the window tells you what it is.
• The email uses your company's branding and comes from your company's sending address, like the other customer emails RushHour sends. It will have its own editable template — a shipment tracking-link template — alongside your other customer email templates in Settings, so you can change the subject and the wording.
• If the order has no usable link — none has been created yet, or the last one was revoked or has expired — RushHour creates a fresh one and sends that. The Tracking tab then shows the new link.
• If the same address was sent this order's link moments ago, that address is skipped so a double-click doesn't send twice. RushHour tells you which addresses were skipped.
• If some recipients could not be reached, the send still counts for the rest and you are told which ones failed.
• Emailing a link is recorded in the order's Audit log.

Sending needs the same Manage tracking links permission as copying.

What your customer sees

The stops

Every pickup and delivery of the order is listed in travel order, numbered, with its status, its planned date and time, and the driver's actual arrival and departure once they exist.

For a delivery set up as a blind shipment, the page hides what the blind paperwork hides: no location name and no street line. The city, state and postal code still appear, exactly as they do on the blind bill of lading.

The map

The map shows the stops RushHour can place, numbered to match the list and coloured by status, with the road between them where the route is known.

• A stop whose exact position must stay hidden — a blind stop — is drawn as a rough area, never as a pin, and the drawn road is cut short around it.
• Stops RushHour cannot place at all are still listed; the page says how many of them are missing from the map.
• Nothing is ever drawn as a straight line between two stops. If the real road is not known, no line is drawn.

Creating or emailing a link gives RushHour a chance to look up the addresses it could not place, so a link you have just created usually covers more stops than the tab reported a moment earlier.

The vehicle

What the page shows about the vehicle is decided entirely by your company's setting in Settings → Tracking Links:

Setting	What the customer sees
Approximate area (the starting value)	A rough area, about a kilometre across, around the vehicle's latest position — and only while the shipment is actually moving.
Last completed stop only	No position at all. The page says which stop was completed and when. The estimated arrival still appears.
Live position while heading to the shipment	The vehicle's exact position, but only while the driver is on the way to one of this order's stops. At any other moment, and near a blind stop, the page falls back to the approximate area.

Whichever setting you use, the page only ever shows where the vehicle is now — never a trail of where it has been — and it shows nothing at all when the last position is too old to be useful.

Keeping up to date

The page refreshes itself while it is open, and refreshes faster when there is a live position to follow than when there is only an approximate area. It stops refreshing while the customer has the tab in the background, and catches up as soon as they come back to it.

The page is available in English and Hebrew. Adding ?lang=en or ?lang=he to the end of the address opens it in that language.

The facts on the Tracking tab

The Tracking tab reports what has happened to the link:

Fact	What it means
Times opened	How many times somebody opened the page. The page's own automatic refreshes while a tab stays open are not counted, so this is a count of visits, not of minutes.
Last opened	When the page was last opened.
Last emailed	When the link was last emailed, and to whom.
Map	How many of the order's stops can be placed on the map, out of the total.
Created / Expires	When the link was issued and when it stops working.

Because the link needs no sign-in, RushHour cannot tell you who opened it — only that it was opened.

Revoke a link

Select Revoke link on the Tracking tab. The link stops working immediately for everyone who has it, including anyone you already emailed. Afterwards the tab offers Create a new link and copy, which issues a fresh address; the revoked one never comes back.

Revoke a link when it has reached the wrong person, or when the customer no longer needs it.

Expiry

Every link stops working on its own after the lifetime your company sets in Settings → Tracking Links. The Tracking tab shows the exact date under Expires. An expired link behaves like a revoked one: it simply stops opening, and you can issue a new one.

Turning the feature off

Turning Enable public tracking links off in Settings → Tracking Links hides the tracking actions and stops every link your company has issued, including links already sent to customers. Turning it back on makes the unexpired ones work again.