Freight forwarding: quote requests that arrive ready to price

The problem

An enquiry arrives by email, on WhatsApp, or through a contact form that asks for a name and a message. It rarely carries what a quote needs. Someone reads it, works out what is missing — the lane, the incoterm, whether it is FCL or LCL, gross and chargeable weight, dimensions, the ready date — and writes back to ask. Nothing can be priced until the answer comes back.

What comes back is then retyped. The shipment goes into a working spreadsheet, and the rate is built from a second one holding lane rates, surcharges and validity dates. The two are not connected, so the person quoting is the connection: reading across, copying over, and carrying in their head which version of the rate sheet is current.

By the time the quote goes out, the same details have been written down three times, and nobody can say from the outside which enquiries are still open, which were quoted, and which were quoted and never chased.

What the software does about it

1. 01

   The request arrives structured

   Capture is built around what a freight quote actually needs, so service, origin, destination, cargo and ready date are asked for at the point of enquiry rather than reconstructed afterwards. An enquiry arrives as something that can be actioned instead of a blank message to reply to.

2. 02

   Coverage answers the question before the form does

   Services and the lanes covered are set out publicly, so a shipper can tell whether they are in scope before they send anything. Out-of-scope enquiries stop arriving, and the ones that arrive are worth reading.

3. 03

   The rate sheet stops being retyped

   The rates the team already maintains become something the quote is built from, rather than a second spreadsheet somebody copies out of. Which version is current stops being a thing anyone has to remember.

4. 04

   A quote has a state

   Open, quoted, chased, won, lost — visible without asking the person who sent it. This is ordinary operations software: job tracking and internal records, applied to the pipeline a forwarder already runs in their head.

This is not a rate management platform, a TMS or a customs filing system, and it does not replace one. It is the layer in front: getting an enquiry in with the detail intact, and getting a priced answer back out.