How are Pickups created from Commercial Service schedules?
For services with a set schedule, such as Commercial Services, Discovery creates Pickups ahead of time so your pickup history is filled in before invoices arrive. Scheduled pickups are created up to a month out. Discovery updates them when the service's pickup days, level of service or suspension change, and when a vendor invoice for the service is approved.
Watch this brief video to learn more about pickups.
Discovery only does this when the service's Service Schedule Type is Scheduled, the service isn't suspended, and the service's bin details are complete. If the bin is missing details such as its size, quantity, material type or disposal method, no pickups are created for that service. Pickups also aren't created for dates before the service's effective date.
Automatically generated pickups have the source "Service Schedule". Each emptying carries an estimated weight based on the bin's size, quantity and material.
Pickup Days vs. Average Pickups Per Week
A Scheduled service tells Discovery how often it is serviced in one of two ways:
- Pickup Days: the specific days of the week the hauler services the bins (for example, Monday and Thursday).
- Average Pickups Per Week: the number of pickups per week, without specific days (for example, 2).
Both settings represent the same amount of service, but Discovery creates pickups differently for each.
Service with Pickup Days (Monday and Thursday)
Discovery creates one Pickup record for each scheduled day. Each record is dated on that day and has a Times Emptied value of 1.
In October 2026 this service gets 9 separate pickups:
| Day | Dates |
|---|---|
| Mondays | Oct 5, 12, 19, 26 |
| Thursdays | Oct 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 |
The count follows the calendar, so it changes from month to month. A month with five Mondays or five Thursdays gets more pickups than a month with four of each.
Below is an example of a Regularly Scheduled Commercial Service, where a Pickup record was automatically generated on the scheduled service day.
This is the matching and automatically generated Pickup record generated on Thursday 05/02/2024.
Service with no Pickup Days and Average Pickups Per Week of 2
Discovery doesn't know which days the service happens, so it creates one Pickup record per month:
- It covers the whole month (for example, Oct 1 – Oct 31).
- Its Times Emptied value is the expected number of pickups for the month.
- Its estimated weight covers all of those pickups.
The expected count comes from the Average Pickups Per Week value, so every full month gets the same count, whether it has 28, 30 or 31 days. Times Emptied can be a decimal because it's an average.
Side-by-side
|
|
Pickup Days (Mon & Thu) | Avg. Pickups Per Week = 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Records per month | One per scheduled day | One for the whole month |
| Pickup date | The actual service day | First to last day of the month |
| Times Emptied | 1 per record | The expected monthly count on the single record |
| Monthly total | Follows the calendar (8 or 9, etc.) | The same every full month |
| Best for | Fixed, known service days | Unknown or varying service days |
Tip: If you know the service days, enter them as Pickup Days. You get dated pickups and more accurate monthly counts. When a service has both, Discovery uses the Pickup Days.
Partial months and schedule changes
- Pickup Days: pickups are created only on scheduled days that fall on or after the service's effective date (and on or before its termination date).
- Average Pickups Per Week: in a partial month, the record covers only the days the service is active, and Times Emptied is lowered to match.
- If a schedule changes mid-month, each part of the month uses the schedule that was in effect for it.
Pickups you enter or edit
If you manually enter or edit a pickup, Discovery keeps it when it updates scheduled pickups:
- Pickup Days: if a pickup you entered or edited already covers a scheduled day, no generated pickup is added for that day.
- Average Pickups Per Week: pickups you entered or edited count toward the month, so they aren't counted twice.
If you have additional questions or need more in depth information, please feel free to send us a message using the help beacon in the lower right-hand corner.