What an Order is (the commercial/billing record grouping shipments), its statuses, the confirm/cancel actions, and why customer fields are inherited from the shipper.
An Order is the commercial record of a customer's booking in Orbit. It groups the cargo moves a customer asked for and carries the customer-side details — who booked, who is billed, and the price — but never the carrier, route or vehicle that actually drives the work.
An Order answers a single question: what did the customer book, and who pays for it? It is the commercial and billing side of a job in Orbit. Each Order groups one or more Shipments — the individual cargo moves — and holds the customer, the invoice recipient, the line items and the total price.
What an Order deliberately does not hold is the operational side of the job: the carrier, the driver, the vehicle, the stop sequence, or the rate paid to the carrier. All of that lives on the Tour. Keeping the two apart is what lets you re-plan how a job is driven without ever touching what the customer booked or is billed.
Key highlights
The commercial record — customer, invoice recipient, line items and price all live on the Order.
Groups shipments — one Order can hold several Shipments, or none yet if the booking has only just arrived.
Status follows the work — an Order's status updates on its own as its shipments progress; you never set it by hand.
Two clear actions — you confirm a requested order and cancel an order; everything else follows automatically.
Separate from the truck — the carrier, route and the rate paid for the vehicle live on the Tour, never on the Order.
An Order carries the commercial facts about a booking: the customer, a separate invoice recipient if one applies, the line items, and the total price the customer pays. When you need to answer “did this booking come in, what did they book, who is billed, and what is the price?”, the Order is where you look.
If some customer details look empty on an Order, they are usually inherited, not missing. Contact and address details often live on the linked Shipper's saved record in your address book, and the Order reads through to them rather than duplicating them. Open the linked shipper before treating a blank field as a gap.
Orbit keeps two sides of every job separate: the commercial side (what the customer booked and pays — the Order) and the operational side (who drives it and how — the Tour). The two are joined only through the Shipment. An Order groups one or more Shipments, and each of those shipments is routed onto a Tour for execution. There is no direct link from an Order to a Tour — to move between them, you always go through a shipment.
That is why, to find the Order behind a tour, you open one of the tour's shipments: each Shipment names the Order it belongs to. For the fuller picture, see the Shipments and Tours articles.
An Order's status is a summary of the work underneath it, re-calculated automatically from its shipments. You move an order along by taking actions and by driving its tours — the status simply keeps up. In Orbit MissionControl the orders list groups orders into sections that mirror these states (Requests, Confirmed, Completed and Cancelled).
Status
What it means
Requested
A booking has come in but has not yet been accepted — for example a self-service booking through Orbit Hub awaiting your confirmation. It stays here until you confirm it.
Confirmed
The order has been accepted and its shipments are live and being worked.
Waiting for Tour Review
At least one of the order's shipments has finished its tour and is awaiting your review.
Completed
Every shipment that counts towards the order has been delivered.
Undeliverable
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. Read through the API as failed.
Cancelled
The order was called off.
The exact wording of these labels can be tailored per organisation and language, so what you see may differ slightly from the terms above.
You work an Order through two actions in Orbit MissionControl:
Confirm Order — accepts a Requested order and turns the booking into a live Shipment you can then plan onto a Tour. Orders you create yourself start out already Confirmed.
Cancel Order — calls the order off, and can refund any payments already taken. If the order has routed shipments, Orbit asks how the affected tours should be updated.
For an order with shipments, you never edit its status directly: there is no status field to set. Confirming, cancelling, and the progress of the order's shipments and tours are what move it along. A confirmed order with no shipments, such as a box rental, a box sale or a recycling brokerage, is the exception: use Complete Order, wherever you act on the order, its detail page or its context menu in the orders list, to move it to Completed yourself, since there is no shipment to derive that status from. This is final and hands the order to accounting.
Spaceport Shipping Co. in Lisbon books a delivery of two mixed pallets from Madrid to Lyon. Orbit creates an Order that groups the two Shipments, records Spaceport as the customer and holds the agreed price. The booking arrives as Requested; an operator confirms it, and the order moves to Confirmed with both shipments now live and ready to plan. As each pallet is routed onto a tour, driven and delivered, the order tracks along on its own — reaching Completed only once both shipments have been delivered.
Once every shipment that still counts towards it has been delivered. An order with one shipment delivered and another still in transit stays in progress — that is correct, not stuck. Shipments that were cancelled or failed simply drop out of the count and never hold an order back.
Can an order end any other way?
Yes. An order reads as Undeliverable once every one of its shipments has ended and at least one of them has no cargo left to move, because the goods on it were written off. Orbit derives this from the shipments, so undoing the write-off reopens the order. See the Writing Off Goods That Cannot Be Delivered article.
Can I set an order's status myself?
Not usually. The status is worked out automatically from the order's shipments and their tours: you confirm or cancel the order, and everything else follows. The one exception is a confirmed order with no shipments, such as a box rental, a box sale or a recycling brokerage: use Complete Order, on the order's detail page or its context menu in the orders list, to move it to Completed yourself, since there is nothing else to derive that status from.
Some customer fields look empty — is data missing?
Usually not. Those details are typically inherited from the linked Shipper's saved record. Open the shipper to see them.
Can a carrier see an order?
No. A carrier only ever sees the Tour assigned to them and their own rate — never the Order, the customer, or the price the customer paid.
How do I get from a tour to its order?
Open one of the tour's shipments. Each Shipment names the Order it belongs to; there is no direct tour-to-order link.
Can Orders be managed outside Orbit MissionControl?
Yes. Orders can also be created and managed programmatically — see the Orbit API Reference for the available endpoints.
