Quoting is a bottleneck of one
Rate requests queue behind whoever knows the lanes. Every hour of delay is a shipper calling a competitor who answered first.
Rate request
Structured lane, weight, and service inputs — not a contact form
Movement
Freight & Logistics
The load moves. The paperwork does not.
Freight operators lose margin in the gap between the truck arriving and the invoice going out. Rates are quoted from memory, proof of delivery travels back on paper, and customers call the office because nothing tells them where their shipment is.
Where the work leaks
4 failure points
Delivery and billing are disconnected
The invoice cannot be raised until a signed POD comes back from the driver. Cash sits in a glovebox.
Visibility is a person, not a system
Status lives with the dispatcher. When they are off, the answer is "I will check and call you back."
Compliance drifts silently
Driver licences, insurance, and vehicle inspections expire on dates nobody is watching until one of them fails an audit.
What I build
9 modules
Public site
What the market sees
01
02
Shipment tracking
Reference lookup with live status and ETA, no login required
03
Service lanes & coverage
Where you actually run, with transit times
04
Driver recruitment
Applications that land in a pipeline, not an inbox
Back office & portal
Where the operation actually runs
01
Dispatch board
Loads, vehicles, and drivers on one assignable timeline
02
Driver view
Manifest, navigation handoff, and POD capture on a phone
03
Customer portal
Shipment history, documents, and invoices self-served
04
Rate card manager
Lane pricing with margin floors and surcharge rules
05
Compliance register
Licence, insurance, and inspection expiry per driver and vehicle
What stops being someone’s job
When
Rate request submitted
The system
Price against the lane card, generate a PDF quote, send within minutes
When
Driver captures POD
The system
Attach signature and photos, notify consignee, draft the invoice
When
ETA slips past threshold
The system
SMS the consignee before they call you
When
Document expires in 30 days
The system
Escalating reminder to driver and operations
What moves
Typical baseline → target
Quote turnaround
4–8 hours
Under 15 minutes
POD to invoice
7–14 days
Same day
Status enquiry calls
Daily, per customer
−70% via self-serve tracking
Expired compliance docs
Found at audit
Zero, flagged 30 days out
These are sector baselines and the targets a system of this shape is built to hit — not results measured on a past engagement. Delivered work with implementation notes is on execution logs.
Where we start
Tracking page and the rate-request-to-quote pipeline — the two things that stop the phone ringing.
Integrations
GPS / telematicsSMS gatewayXero / QuickBooksRouting & mapsFuel card data
Typical stack
Eleventy / Next.jsNode.jsPostgreSQLn8nTwilio