Collect a signed POD by text message
Electronic POD texts a one-time signing link to the driver assigned to the delivery leg. The receiver types a name and draws a signature on the driver's phone, and Conterminal generates a signed POD PDF and attaches it to the shipment as the Signed POD. No account, no app, no OTP.
7 minute setup · Updated July 27, 2026
The text goes to the driver, not to the receiver.
There is no field anywhere for a receiver's phone number. Conterminal reads the phone number on the driver record attached to the delivery leg and texts the link there. The intended flow is that the driver hands their phone to whoever signs at the dock. If you were expecting to text the consignee directly, this feature does not do that.
What the receiver sees
The driver's phone receives one message. For a delivery order with a container number it reads:
Conterminal>: POD requested for container MSCU1234567. Open and sign: https://conterminal.com/welcome/electronic-pod#… Msg & data rates may apply. Reply HELP for help, STOP to opt out.
If the delivery order has no container number, the message says your delivery instead of container MSCU1234567. Nothing else about the load is in the text — no address, no customer, no reference number.
Opening the link lands on a page titled Confirm delivery. It is a plain mobile form with the container number, the delivery date when Conterminal has one, a location notice, a Receiver name field, a signature box, and a Save signed POD button. The page is marked no-index and sends no referrer.
Do not refresh that page.
The one-time token travels in the URL fragment and is stripped out of the address bar the moment the page loads, so it is never in browser history or in a referrer header. That is deliberate, but it means a refresh, a back-and-forward, or a re-open from history loses the token and the page says “POD link unavailable” with “Reopen the link from your text message.” The footer of the form warns about this too. The link itself still works — reopen it from the SMS.
When the submission succeeds, the form is replaced by POD submitted and “The signed proof of delivery was saved. You can close this page.” Reopening the same link afterwards shows the same completed screen rather than a second blank form.
Sending the link
- Confirm you can see the button at all. It is shown only to a workspace admin or manager, and only when electronic POD is switched on for the deployment. A workspace user does not see it, and the server re-checks the role on every send.
- Assign a driver to the delivery leg. The link is addressed from the dispatch on the delivery leg. Conterminal prefers a dispatch that is assigned, accepted, or in progress, and falls back to a completed one. Cancelled dispatches and cancelled legs are ignored.
- Open the shipment page and find the delivery leg. The control lives on the delivery leg's document row — the one showing [ MISSING SIGNED POD ] and “No signed POD uploaded yet.” alongside the blank-POD and Upload Signed POD buttons.
- Select Send Electronic POD. The button reads Sending… while the request is in flight.
- Read the confirmation. Success shows a green line reading Text sent to ••• ••• 1234. — the masked driver phone. A failure shows a red line with the exact reason; every one of those strings is listed under Troubleshooting below.
The Send Electronic POD button appears only on the delivery leg row. The Delivery Receipt card in the Operational Documents block higher up the same page never offers it, even for an admin with the feature on. If you cannot find the button, you are almost certainly looking at that card. The button also disappears entirely once any signed POD is on file — a manual upload permanently removes the electronic path for that delivery order.
“Text sent” means the messaging provider accepted the message, not that the phone received it. Conterminal records the provider's later delivered/failed callback against the request, but no screen displays it. If the driver says nothing arrived, treat the send as unconfirmed and reissue rather than waiting.
Reissuing
A delivery order can have exactly one live link at a time. Pressing Send Electronic POD again does not quietly send a second text: it fails with “An electronic POD link is already active for this delivery.” and the button relabels itself to Send New Link. Pressing it a second time asks “Send a new link? The previous electronic POD link will stop working.” and, on confirmation, revokes the old request and texts a fresh one.
There is no way to reissue proactively. The button only becomes Send New Link after a send attempt has failed in this browser tab, so the routine “the driver deleted the text” case takes two clicks and an error message in between. Reloading the page resets the label back to Send Electronic POD, so you have to trigger the error again.
Reissue is refused while a submission is in flight: if the receiver has already opened the form and pressed Save signed POD, you get “The receiver is currently submitting this POD. Refresh in a moment.” That lease clears after two minutes. If the submission finished, you get “This electronic POD has already been completed.” instead.
Reassigning the delivery driver, cancelling the leg, or cancelling the job invalidates an outstanding link immediately. The receiver's page then reports “This POD link is no longer available.” Send a new one after the reassignment.
Name, signature, and location
The form asks for three things, in this order.
- Delivery location
- The browser asks for location as soon as the form loads, using a low-accuracy request with an eight-second timeout. The panel explains: “We ask for your location to record where this delivery was signed. You can continue if location is unavailable.” A granted fix reads “Location captured (about 30 m accuracy).” A refusal reads “Location permission was denied. You can still submit.” A Try location again button retries.
- Receiver name
- A plain text field. This is the person signing at the dock, not the driver and not the consignee company. It becomes the Received by line on the PDF.
- Receiver signature
- A finger-drawn signature box with a Clear signature button. It is captured as a PNG image with a white background and black ink, and is reproduced on the PDF exactly as drawn.
Location is never blocking. Denied, timed out, and unavailable are all accepted and recorded as such, and if the location request is still pending when the receiver submits, it is recorded as a timeout. The name and the signature are blocking: an empty or one-character name gives “Enter the receiver name.” and an untouched signature box gives “Add the receiver signature.”
Submitting generates the signed POD PDF, files it against the delivery order as the Signed POD document, and — if the delivery order had no actual delivery date yet — stamps the submission date as the delivery date. An existing delivery date is left alone.
If someone uploads or emails in a signed POD while the receiver is signing, the manual document wins. The receiver sees “A signed POD is already on file.”, their signature and generated PDF are deleted, and the link is revoked. Their signing effort is lost, so do not upload a paper POD for a delivery you have just texted a link for.
Real limits
| Limit | Value | What happens at the edge |
|---|---|---|
| Link lifetime | 72 hours | Measured from the send. Nothing counts it down on screen. An expired link resolves as gone, but a receiver who started signing before expiry can still finish. |
| Live links per delivery order | 1 | Enforced in the database. A reissue revokes the previous link in the same transaction, so the old one dies the instant the new one is created. |
| Receiver name | 2 to 120 characters | The field stops accepting input at 120. Fewer than two characters after trimming is rejected by both the form and the server. |
| Signature format | PNG only | The server checks the PNG file signature itself and rejects anything else. Nothing in the form lets a receiver upload a photo or a scan. |
| Signature size | 512 KB decoded | A larger image is rejected as invalid. The whole request is capped at 800 KB, over which the response is “The signature image is too large.” |
| Location accuracy | Better than 100 km | A fix coarser than that is discarded rather than stored as a misleading coordinate. |
| Submission lease | 2 minutes | One submission owns the link at a time. A second attempt gets a “still saving” response; the form retries itself once after a moment. |
| Driver phone number | US or Canada | Ten digits, or eleven starting with 1. Extensions, international numbers, and anything else are refused before a text is attempted. |
STOP, START, and HELP
Every POD text ends with “Reply HELP for help, STOP to opt out.” Those replies are handled by the messaging carrier first, and Conterminal mirrors the result into its own suppression list so a send is blocked before it reaches the provider.
- STOP
- Also STOPALL, STOP ALL, END, CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE, and QUIT. Suppresses that phone number. Any later send to it fails with “Text messages are disabled for the phone ending in 1234.”
- START
- Also UNSTOP. Clears the suppression for that number. It is the only way back — nothing in the Conterminal interface can un-suppress a phone.
- HELP
- Also INFO. Returns the carrier's configured help response. It is recorded but does not change whether the number is suppressed.
Matching is case-insensitive and ignores trailing punctuation, so stop. and Stop! both count. Anything else the driver texts back is ignored — nobody at your workspace reads replies to that number.
Suppression follows the phone number, not the workspace or the delivery. If a driver texts STOP once, every future electronic POD text to that number is blocked, for every load and every workspace, until that same phone texts START. The only fix is asking the driver to text START; support cannot override it.
What Conterminal keeps
- Stored
- The receiver name, the signature image, the generated PDF, the submission timestamp, the coordinates and accuracy when location was granted, the phone's last four digits, and the provider message id with its delivery timestamps. The signature and the PDF live in a private storage bucket, reachable only through the shipment's document links.
- Never stored
- The signing link itself and the driver's full phone number. Only a one-way hash of the token and a keyed fingerprint of the phone are kept, which is why the interface can show you the last four digits but can never re-display a link you already sent.
The finished PDF is the same POD form your drivers carry on paper, with the electronic values filled in: Received by shows the typed name, the signature box shows the drawn image, Date / time shows the server-side submission time, and a Location line shows either a coordinate pair with its accuracy in metres or one of Location permission denied, Location request timed out, or Location unavailable. It is filed as POD-MSCU1234567.pdf and behaves like any other uploaded signed POD from that point on: open it, download it, or include it in a document print run.
The public form is served without an account and without a session, so the only thing possession of the link grants is the ability to sign that one delivery. The page discloses only the container number and the delivery date; it exposes no customer, address, rate, or reference. Tokens, names, phone numbers, signatures, and coordinates are kept out of application logs and error reports.
Troubleshooting
“Assign a driver to the delivery leg before sending an electronic POD.”
There is no usable dispatch on the delivery leg — no leg at all, no dispatch, or every dispatch is cancelled. Assign the delivery driver first, then send. The same message also appears if the operation job itself cannot be found for the delivery order.
“This move has more than one delivery leg. Resolve the route before sending.”
Electronic POD signs one delivery, so it refuses to guess which leg the receiver is signing for. Cancel the leg that no longer applies, or finish the route rework, and the button will work. There is no way to pick a leg manually.
“The assigned delivery driver does not have a phone number.”
The driver record has no phone on it. Add the mobile number to the driver profile, then send again. A number on the truck, the carrier, or the dispatch note is not read.
“The assigned driver's phone number must be a valid US or Canadian number.”
The stored number is not ten digits, or eleven digits starting with 1. Extensions, letters, and international numbers all fail here. Clean up the driver record rather than retrying.
“Text messages are disabled for the phone ending in 1234.”
That phone replied STOP (or CANCEL, END, QUIT, UNSUBSCRIBE, STOPALL) to a previous message. Only the phone can undo it, by texting START or UNSTOP to the same number. Until then, use a paper POD or upload a signed one.
“An electronic POD link is already active for this delivery.”
A live link already exists and has not been used or expired. This is the normal prompt to reissue: the button becomes Send New Link, and pressing it confirms before revoking the old link and texting a new one.
“The receiver is currently submitting this POD. Refresh in a moment.”
Somebody has the form open and has pressed Save signed POD. The lease lasts two minutes. Wait it out and refresh the shipment page — most of the time the POD simply appears and there is nothing left to send.
“A signed POD is already attached to this delivery order.”
A signed POD document already exists, whether uploaded, emailed in, or previously signed electronically. Electronic POD never overwrites it. Delete or replace the existing document through the normal document workflow if it is wrong.
“This electronic POD has already been completed.”
The receiver already signed this link. The signed POD is on the shipment. If you need a second signature, that is not something this feature supports — use a paper POD.
“The delivery assignment changed. Refresh and try again.”
The dispatch, leg, or job changed between the moment the page loaded and the moment you pressed send. Reload the shipment page so you are looking at the current assignment, then send again.
“The text could not be confirmed. Send a new link before trying again.”
The messaging provider timed out or rejected the message after Conterminal had already created the link. Assume nothing arrived. The button switches to Send New Link — use it, rather than pressing send repeatedly.
“Electronic POD could not be sent. Try again.”
An unexpected server-side failure. Retry once. If it repeats, contact support with the container number and the time — do not keep retrying, because each attempt can leave a revoked request behind.
“Electronic POD is not enabled.” or “Text messaging is not configured.”
The feature or its messaging provider is switched off for this deployment. This is a configuration state, not an account problem; nothing you do on the shipment page will change it. Contact support.
“You do not have permission to send an electronic POD.”
Your role is below workspace manager, or you do not have document access to this delivery order. Ask a workspace admin to send it or to raise your role.
The driver sees “POD link unavailable”
Read the second line. “Reopen the link from your text message.” means the page was refreshed or reopened from history and lost its token — tap the original SMS link again. “This POD link is no longer available.” means the link was revoked, expired, or the driver assignment changed; send a new link. “Electronic POD is not available right now.” means the feature is switched off.
The driver sees “A signed POD is already on file.” after signing
A signed POD was attached by another route while they were signing. Their submission was discarded on purpose so the two documents cannot conflict. Check the shipment: the POD that is there is the one that counts.
The driver sees “The POD could not be saved.”
The PDF or the signature could not be generated or stored. The link is released rather than burned, so the receiver can press Save signed POD again on the same page. If a second attempt fails too, fall back to a paper POD and contact support.
Contact
Most electronic POD problems are one of three things: no driver assigned to the delivery leg, a driver record with a missing or malformed phone number, or a phone that has replied STOP. Check those three before writing in — they account for almost every send that fails on the first attempt.