Freight forwarders & customs brokers
A forwarder buys freight and sells freight, and the difference between those two numbers is the business. This is software for the half of that job that happens after the cargo moves.
Six problems
Each of these is something that goes wrong in a practice for reasons that have nothing to do with drafting, and each is answered by a rule rather than by a feature.
The engine rates the shipment from the contract independently and shows expected against invoiced with the variance at the top. Clearing what is correct takes a click; what is left is the part worth an email.
Accrual runs on the gate event’s own timestamp, not on when the message landed, and a box approaching free-time expiry raises an exception before it costs money rather than after.
A disputed line carries its history. When the same code reappears on the next invoice it is surfaced with what happened last time and who raised it.
Every document is cross-footed before it renders, and a form field with no mapping raises rather than shipping blank. The failure happens at draft time, when there is still time.
Issuing mints the originals as rows. A second issuance is refused while any is neither surrendered nor voided, and the refusal names which ones are outstanding.
A shipment, end to end
Customer, lane, mode and Incoterm recorded — none of them defaulted, because the Incoterm decides which party bears each charge. Consignee, notify party and vessel are screened before the booking is accepted.
Packing lists, commercial invoices, carrier invoices and EDI status parsed row by row, with everything refused shown as the file wrote it. Parsed plus rejected plus duplicate equals what arrived.
Chargeable weight by the mode’s own rule, the tariff resolved by lane and date with minimums and break points, surcharges layered by formula. A lane with no contract in force is refused.
The carrier invoice arrives and is reconciled against what the contract said. Variances are classified, disputes are raised by one person and approved by another, and the shipment margin cross-foots.
Documents drafted with amounts only from charge lines, cross-footed before rendering, reviewed, and then issued — minting the originals, which is the step that cannot be repeated while one is outstanding.
The number that matters
The number the business is actually run on, cross-footed before it is shown.
What we assume
Most forwarders have a transport management system with years of shipment history in it, and replacing that is not what this is for. The console is one client of an API: status messages arrive as EDI or carrier events, exports come as documents, spreadsheets, structured data and EDI, and completion callbacks are signed so a receiving system can verify them. If the only thing you ever use is the invoice audit, that is a reasonable way to use it.
Which reconciliation ate the week, what a reviewer sent back, and how the ledgers actually arrive. That conversation is more useful than any demonstration we could prepare in advance.
Get in touch
No chatbot and no ticket queue. Tell us what your operation actually looks like — the modes you move, whether you clear your own customs, and roughly how many shipments a month — and someone who works on the software will reply.
info@legosphere.com