PCS Delivery day
Stage four: Delivery Day(s). The truck is at the curb and someone is shouting numbers at you. This is the ritual PCS Pal was built for — and it all works with no signal.
Before the truck arrives
Two minutes of prep saves the whole day:
- Charge your phone. You'll be holding it for hours.
- Open the app once while you still have Wi-Fi so your digitized sheets are loaded. After that you're fine offline.
- Check your sticker ranges. If your Bingo sheet looks short, a page range is probably wrong — fix it before the crew starts calling numbers, not during.
- Tap Begin Delivery on Home when the truck shows up.
The Bingo sheet
Check Off Bingo Sheet opens a grid of every sticker number in the shipment — built from the inventory pages you photographed on packing day.
As the crew calls a number and carries it through the door, tap that number. That's the whole job.
- A running N of N count stays pinned at the top so you always know where you stand.
- Jump to a number with the search box when they call one out of order — which they will.
- Range chips filter the grid to a block of numbers, or show them all at once.
- Tapped one by mistake? Tap it again and confirm — it goes back to unaccounted, as if it never came off the truck.
This works with zero signal. Every tap is saved to your phone the moment you make it. Empty house, no Wi-Fi, one bar of LTE in a stairwell — doesn't matter.
On a split move the Bingo sheet is per shipment, and the screen names which one you're checking off. The UB shipment that arrived last month keeps its own completed board.
Flag damage on sight
When something comes off the truck broken, crushed, gouged or soaked, don't wait until you're unpacking. Flag it now, while the crew is still standing there.
Use Flag damage from the Bingo sheet, and follow one rule:
Get the sticker in the frame. One photo that shows both the damage and the numbered sticker gives you identity and evidence in a single shot. That's what lets the app tie the damage to the right inventory line — and lets an adjudicator do the same.
Damaged cartons count too. A crushed, wet or punctured box deserves its own photo even before you know what's inside it. If you later pull broken china out of that box, the crushed-carton photo from delivery day is what turns "it was broken when I opened it" into a documented chain — damaged in transit, not damaged by you.
Unaccounted items
Any number you never tapped is unaccounted. The Unaccounted Items screen lists them all — sticker number and item name — so you know what's short before the truck pulls away, not three weeks later.
What to do with that list, right then:
- Read the numbers out to the crew chief. Often it's a box still on the truck, or one carried to the wrong room.
- Anything they can't produce goes on the delivery paperwork as not received — in writing, before you sign.
- Leave the rest in the app. Unaccounted numbers become Missing lines on your claim automatically.
If the screen says every sticker is accounted for, that's a clean delivery — nothing to chase.
High-value check-off
Check Off High Value Items runs on delivery day too, not just during unpacking. As each high-value item comes in, open the list and answer for it:
- Undamaged — a green tick, done.
- Damaged — take a photo — goes straight to the camera, and the photo lands on that exact item.
- Missing — writes a Missing line onto your claim on the spot.
These are the items most worth opening while the crew is still present. A camera or a laptop is small enough to check in ten seconds, and "it was fine at delivery" is much harder to argue with when you looked.
The Door Report
Before the crew leaves — before you sign anything — open Do the Door Report. This is the most valuable two minutes of the day.
The Door Report pulls together what actually happened:
- How many stickers are unaccounted, and which ones
- How many damage flags you logged
- The exact wording to write on the delivery form — the AT-delivery notification of loss or damage (the 1850) that the crew hands you
- Any Quick Claim candidates — small items a TSP can settle on the spot
- Your delivery date, which you can correct with Change if the app has it wrong
Exceptions in writing beat memory every time. Copy the Door Report's lines onto the delivery form before you sign it. A signed form with no exceptions is the TSP's best defense against your claim later.
Then choose how the delivery ended:
- Partial — more coming if another truck is still due.
- Delivery complete if that was the last truck. The app confirms first, because completing delivery starts your loss and damage clocks and freezes what's short.
Your delivery date is the date everything is counted from. The 180-day notice window and your DPS filing window both run off it. If the app shows the wrong day, fix it here — see Deadlines.
Partial deliveries and split shipments
Deliveries that arrive in pieces are normal, and the app expects them. Mark the delivery Partial — more coming and your Bingo sheet stays exactly as it is — already-checked numbers stay checked, and the next truck picks up where you left off against the same board.
A split move (HHG and UB) is different from a partial delivery: those are two separate shipments with their own boards, their own delivery dates, and their own clocks. The app keeps them apart, and Home tells you which one you're working on.
After the crew leaves
Your move moves into Unpacking, and the app goes quiet again. From here damage shows up gradually as you open boxes, and that's exactly what the next stage is designed for.
Keep doing three things:
- Photograph damage as you find it, box by box.
- Finish checking off high-value items.
- Don't throw away the cartons things broke in until you've photographed them.