See volume by lane with a lane-label formula on orders

The situation

Ask a pricing lead how much freight you ran Chicago to Dallas last month and watch them open a spreadsheet. Lanes are how your rates are quoted and your trucks are planned, yet the Orders board shows a lane as two columns, origin city and destination city, and a person has to read both on every row to know which loads belong together. Sorting by origin puts every Chicago load in a pile, but the Dallas, Memphis and Atlanta loads are mixed through it, so the count ends up being done by hand, usually once a month, after the rate you should have raised has already moved. A Lane field on the Order puts the whole lane in one cell, “Chicago → Dallas”, and because a formula field builds it from the two cities, nobody types it and it stays right when an address changes.

The workflow

The formula is one line. You insert both cities from the editor’s field list, so they appear as chips rather than typed text:

concat({Origin City}, " → ", {Destination City})

The arrow is ordinary text between the two fields, so the label reads origin first, then destination, the way your team already says a lane. The clip above covers steps 1 to 4 and then cancels, so nothing was saved.

1. Click Settings, then Objects, and open Order. Object Builder opens on Available fields. Click Create custom field.
2. Type Lane in Field name, pick Formula in Field type, and click Set formula. The editor opens on an empty formula box.
3. Type concat(, then type { and the start of Origin. The list narrows to Origin City and Origin State; pick Origin City. Type , " → ", , then { and Destination, pick Destination City, and close with ). Pick the city fields, not the state or a whole address: concat accepts any field, so a wrong pick still passes and just puts the wrong words in every label.
4. When the formula is complete, Output opens below the box. Read Field type: it says Text. That is the lane label, one value per order, which the board can sort and filter like any other text column.
5. Click Set formula, then Create. In Available fields, click Add beside Lane so it shows in the Order’s data panel, then click Save changes.
6. Open an order whose lane you know. For example, ORD-28 picks up in Gary, Indiana and delivers to Dallas, so if its Origin City reads Gary, Lane should read Gary → Dallas. Then open an order still missing a delivery address and check what your team will see there.

From here, every order carries its own lane, worked out each time it is read. When a CSR fixes a delivery address, the label follows. The formula fields page covers the editor itself: the function groups, and what to check before a board relies on a formula.

Extend it

• Sort and filter the board by it. On the Orders board, click Configure, then Columns, and move Lane into Shown fields. Sort by Lane so the same lanes sit together, or filter it to one lane and save the view, for example Chicago → Dallas, so the pricing lead opens the list instead of building it. Views are covered in board views.
• Count loads per lane on a chart. A formula field that returns text can be picked in a chart’s Group by, so a Bar chart grouped by Lane draws one bar per lane, counting orders. Filter the view first, to this month or one origin city: a busy board has more lanes than a chart can label. The chart views page has the clicks.
• Name lanes the way your rate sheet does. Swap the cities for Origin State and Destination State to get “IL → TX” lanes for regional pricing, or keep both fields and add a second Lane (State) field next to the city one.
• Pair it with margin. With a Margin % field on the same orders, a view sorted by Lane, then Margin %, shows which lanes keep running thin.