When another business dispatches addresses you service, each of your stops carries an assignment that is pending until you answer. Declining is the answer "not us, not this time". How to press the buttons is in Accept or decline a dispatch invitation; this article is what the decline does underneath.
Scope
You can decline one stop (from the stop itself), the routes you tick in the banner, or the whole slice still waiting for an answer. A reason is required each time, up to 500 characters; the server refuses a decline without one, whichever client sent it.
Two details of scope are worth knowing:
- A slice-wide decline touches only stops that are still pending. Stops you already accepted are never backed out of by declining; hand those back one by one.
- If two of your routes cover the same address and you decline only one of them, the stop stays yours through the route you kept. Decline both in the same answer and the stop is declined.
What it changes
- Your business is no longer responsible for those stops. They fall back to the owner, who sees Declined on each stop and on the route header (no progress bar, no driver badge), and on a zone dispatch a Denied pill beside your name. Your reason shows when they hover.
- Nothing is ever billed or settled toward you for a declined stop: no customer line in your name, no subcontractor line in either direction.
- A stop that every assigned business declined, and that nobody started, is denied and untaken. It does not block the owner from completing the dispatch, it stays unbilled, it is not a missing driver, and it still reads Declined after the rest is completed.
- The owner's business gets a bell notification, {0} declined {1}, with your reason as its text, and its administrators a push. The changelog records the answer, the scope and the reason.
Reversible
A decline is not final. Accepting the same stops again re-takes them and retires the reason; the banner offers exactly that once the rest of your slice is answered. Re-declining a route with a new reason replaces the old one. Once the owner cancels the dispatch, there is nothing left to answer.
The owner's side
The owner can also record an answer on your behalf, for example after a phone call, from the stop's subcontractor status; that marks it Denied. Same effect, same reason requirement. What the owner sees and hears is in Who is told what.
On a zone dispatch the owner can do it for your whole pending slice at once: your Awaiting response pill opens Accept on their behalf / Decline on their behalf. A decline done that way is the same decline described above, with the owner's reason instead of yours, applied only to the addresses you had not answered yet; your administrators are told, with the reason. See When the owner answers for you.