Order, Shipment, Tour & Leg Statuses – and how they update
How statuses update automatically as you work, why an order's status reflects its shipments, and a quick reference of the status names on Orders/Shipments/Tours/Legs.
Every Order, Shipment and Tour in Orbit carries a status that keeps you informed at a glance. You never set these statuses by hand: you do the work, and Orbit updates the status for you.
Statuses are how Orbit tells you where each piece of work stands. As you plan shipments, assign carriers, run tours and confirm orders, the matching status moves along with you. Because statuses follow the work rather than being typed in, they stay accurate without anyone having to remember to update them.
This article explains how statuses change, how an Order's status reflects the Shipments inside it, and lists the status names you will see in Orbit MissionControl.
Key highlights:
Hands-off: You take an action; Orbit sets the status. There is no field to fill in and no status to pick from a list.
Immediate: The moment your action lands, the related records update straight away. There is nothing to wait for and nothing to refresh.
Orders summarise their shipments: An Order's status is a reflection of the Shipments it contains, so it tells you how the whole booking is progressing.
Consistent: The same status is shown wherever a record appears, so a list view and a detail view always agree.
In Orbit you change a status by doing something, not by editing the status itself. The work you and your drivers carry out is what moves each record forward:
Plan a Shipment onto a Tour, and the shipment moves from Unrouted to Routed.
Assign a carrier to a Tour (or let a carrier win it through dispatch), and the tour moves to Assigned.
A driver runs the Tour in Orbit Cockpit, starting it, arriving at and departing from each Stop, and the tour moves through Running.
Review a finished Tour in Orbit MissionControl, and it reaches Tour Completed.
Confirm or cancel an Order, and it moves to Confirmed or Cancelled.
Because a status is a result of an action, you will never be asked to type one in. This is what keeps statuses trustworthy: they always describe what has actually happened.
Execution happens on the Tour. As a driver works through a Tour in Orbit Cockpit, each Shipment the tour carries follows along on its own, moving from Routed through En Route: On the Way to Pickup and En Route: On the Way to Delivery, and on to Delivered once the tour is finished and reviewed. You do not mark a shipment delivered yourself; driving the tour is what carries the shipment forward.
A brand-new Shipment starts as Unrouted. That is not a problem to fix: it simply means the shipment is waiting to be planned onto a Tour. It is a normal starting point, and it becomes Routed as soon as you plan it in.
An Order groups one or more Shipments: it is the customer's booking. Its status is a summary of those shipments, so it always reflects how the booking as a whole is getting on. A few points make this easy to read:
A part-delivered order is still in progress. If one shipment has been delivered but another is still on the road, the Order stays Confirmed. This is working as designed, the booking genuinely is not finished yet.
It completes when every delivered shipment is done. An Order reaches Completed only once every shipment it is still counting has been delivered, not on the first delivery.
Cancelled or failed shipments do not hold it back. A Shipment that has been cancelled or has failed drops out of the order's summary, so it never blocks completion. An Order can complete on its remaining shipments even if one was cancelled or failed.
An order can also end as undeliverable. Once every one of the order's shipments has ended and at least one of them has no cargo left to move, because the goods on it were written off, the Order reads as Undeliverable instead of Completed. Orbit derives this from the shipments, so undoing the write-off reopens the order.
So if an Order shows a status that seems to trail one of its shipments, that is expected: the order is describing the whole set of shipments together, not just the one you last touched.
Below are the statuses an operator sees in Orbit MissionControl for each record. A few views use a slightly shorter label for the same status (for example, an Assigned tour appears as Upcoming in some places). The meanings, however, stay the same.
Not yet planned onto a Tour, waiting to be scheduled.
Partially Routed
Carried in stages, with some stages planned onto a Tour and some not yet.
Routed
Planned onto a Tour, ready to be carried out.
En Route: On the Way to Pickup
The driver is on the way to collect the load.
En Route: On the Way to Delivery
The load has been collected and is on its way to the delivery point.
Waiting at Hub
The load has been set down at an intermediate stop and is waiting for its next stage to collect it. A planned pause, not a fault.
Waiting for Tour Review
The tour carrying it has finished and is awaiting review.
Delivered
Successfully delivered.
Failed
The delivery could not be completed. This is not a dead end: retrying the stage or returning the cargo clears it, and the shipment recovers by itself. A shipment whose cargo has been written off closes here as undeliverable, and stays there.
Cancelled
The shipment was called off, or every load on it moved to a return shipment. The record is kept for your history.
When no loads remain to move, Orbit MissionControl shows a shipment with delivered loads and failed or written-off loads as Partially Delivered; the stored shipment status remains Failed.
One further status belongs to the cargo rather than to the shipment. A Load that can never be delivered is written off, and reports the status Perished through the API. A write-off moves nothing and creates nothing: the Shipment holding that load closes as undeliverable, while delivered loads on the same shipment stay delivered. See the Writing Off Goods That Cannot Be Delivered article.
A Leg is one stage of a shipment's journey. Every shipment has at least one, so a shipment carried straight from pickup to dropoff has a single leg covering the whole journey. These statuses come into view once a shipment is carried in stages, see the Legs article for how legs make up a journey.
Status
What it means
Unrouted
Not yet planned onto a Tour. A normal resting state.
Routed
Planned onto a tour, which has not started moving it yet.
En Route: On the Way to Pickup
The tour is running and heading for this leg's pickup.
At Pickup
The driver has arrived at the pickup.
En Route: On the Way to Delivery
The loads are aboard and on their way to this leg's dropoff.
At Delivery Stop
The driver has arrived at the dropoff.
Delivered
This leg is complete. Its loads reached its dropoff.
Failed
This leg could not be completed. The record is kept, and the leg can be retried.
Cancelled
This leg was called off before it began.
A shipment's status follows the least advanced of its legs, so a shipment never reports more progress than the stage that is furthest behind.
While a Tour is Running, its status does not change with every stop. Instead the tour carries a finer-grained substatus that tells you exactly where the driver is right now. Like every other status, it follows the driver’s work in Orbit Cockpit and is never set by hand:
Arrived at stop: the driver has arrived at a stop. Orbit records which stop it is and when the driver got there.
Departed from stop: the driver has finished the stop and moved on. The tour is on its way to the next stop.
One further substatus appears before a carrier is attached: while a tour is still Not Assigned and has been offered to carriers, it shows as In callout. The tour is out on the Marketplace waiting for a carrier to accept or win it. As soon as a carrier is assigned, the substatus clears and the tour moves to Assigned as usual.
The substatus is what powers the live stop-by-stop view in Orbit MissionControl, and it is also available programmatically alongside the tour status.
An operator at Orion Industries books an Order with two Shipments: one from Lisbon to Madrid, and one from Lisbon to Barcelona. The operator confirms the Order, so it moves to Confirmed, and plans both shipments onto Tours, which moves each shipment to Routed. As each driver runs their Tour in Orbit Cockpit, the matching Shipment moves through the En Route stages on its own. No one edits a status. The Madrid shipment is delivered first, but the Order stays Confirmed, because the Barcelona shipment is still on the road. Once the Barcelona driver finishes and the operator reviews that Tour in Orbit MissionControl, the second Shipment reaches Delivered and the Order moves to Completed by itself. Had the Barcelona shipment been cancelled instead, the Order would still have completed on the Madrid delivery alone.
Almost never. You do the work (plan, assign, run the tour, confirm, cancel), and Orbit applies the right status. The one exception is completing a confirmed order that has no shipments, such as an equipment hire, a sale of packaging or a brokered service in which nothing is transported: use Complete Order, on the order's detail page or its context menu in the orders list, to set it to Completed yourself, since there is no shipment to derive that from.
My order still shows Confirmed even though one of its shipments was delivered. Is something wrong?
No, this is working as designed. An Order reflects all of its shipments together, so it stays Confirmed until every shipment that counts has been delivered. A part-delivered order is correctly still in progress.
One of my shipments failed, yet the order still completed. How?
A cancelled or failed Shipment drops out of the order's summary, so it does not block completion. Once the remaining shipments are all delivered, the Order completes. Where a shipment ended with its cargo written off, the order reads as Undeliverable instead of completing.
My shipment shows Failed. How do I clear it?
By acting on the stage that failed: retry it, or move the cargo onto a return shipment. The status then clears by itself. See the When a Delivery Fails article. A shipment whose cargo was written off is the exception: those goods will never travel again, so it stays closed as undeliverable unless the write-off is undone.
How soon do statuses update?
Straight away. When your action lands, the related Shipments and Orders update in the same step. There is nothing to wait for or refresh.
Why does the same status look slightly different in different places?
A few views use a shorter label for the same status (for example, Assigned may appear as Upcoming). The underlying meaning is always the same.
My shipment shows Waiting at Hub or Partially Routed. What do those mean?
Both belong to a shipment carried in stages. Waiting at Hub means its load has been set down at an intermediate stop and is waiting for the next stage to collect it; Partially Routed means some stages are planned and some are not yet. See the Legs article.
I have never split a shipment. Do I need the leg statuses?
Not in practice. A shipment carried straight through has a single Leg spanning its whole journey, and you plan and follow it exactly as you would any shipment.
Can I read statuses outside Orbit MissionControl?
Yes. Statuses are available programmatically for integrations. See the Orbit API Reference for the available fields and values.
