Every term a coordinator hears daily and a controller hears quarterly, written the way you'd explain it to the person who asked. Not the way a contract would.
The paper that moves with the load, and the chasing it causes when it doesn't.
The contract between shipper and carrier for a specific load. It lists what was handed over, where it's going, and on what terms. No BOL, no proof the load existed.
The receiver's signature or confirmation that the freight arrived. The document that closes the invoice, and the one most often chased by phone at 4:55 pm.
The carrier's written acceptance of a quoted rate before pickup. The number finance checks the invoice against, when the invoice ever gets checked.
Proof a carrier carries the required liability coverage. Certificates expire quietly, and collecting current ones is a job nobody was hired to do.
The customs document cross-border shipments clear on. Wrong or late, the load sits at the border while the meter runs.
Where the rates come from, and where they leak.
The base charge for moving freight from origin to destination, before anything extra gets added.
Any charge beyond the line-haul: detention, liftgate, re-delivery, extra stops. Individually small, collectively where invoice surprises live.
A floating percentage added to rates to track diesel prices. It moves monthly and is rarely re-checked.
The price for a load bought one at a time, today. Set by whoever's fastest on the phone, unless you have a benchmark.
A negotiated rate held for a period, usually a year. Only as good as the benchmark behind the negotiation.
The meter that runs when a truck waits. Charged per hour after an agreed free period, and one of the most disputed lines on any invoice.
The carrier's bill. Frequently different from the rate confirmation, which is exactly why matching the two matters.
What comparable businesses actually paid on a lane, recently. The number that turns "that's the market" into a claim you can check.
How the freight physically moves.
Freight that shares a trailer with other shippers' loads. Priced by weight, freight class, and lane.
A dedicated trailer for one shipper's load. One price for the whole truck, whether it's full or not.
Shipments moving between Canada and the US. Adds customs, bonds, and paperwork to every lane, and a second currency of delay.
A refrigerated trailer. Temperature-controlled freight with its own rate structure, equipment scarcity, and liability.
An open-deck trailer for freight that won't fit or can't go in a van: steel, lumber, machinery.
A container that moves by truck and rail in the same box. Cheaper on long lanes, slower and less flexible door to door.
Who's who in a transaction, and who actually holds the information.
The party with the freight. In most mid-market companies, also the party with four other jobs.
The receiver of the shipment. Their dock hours, appointments, and rules shape the whole load.
The company that physically moves the freight. Asset-based carriers own the trucks they run.
A middleman who sells carrier capacity at a markup. Useful in a pinch, expensive as a system, and the benchmark stays with them.
Outsourced freight management. Can run the loads well while the shipper still owns none of the data.
A coordinator for complex or international moves: consolidation, customs, multi-leg routing.
The software layer, and the records it should be keeping.
An origin-destination pair, like Toronto to Montreal. The unit freight economics are actually measured in.
The formal offer of a load to a carrier. Who gets offered first, and why, quietly sets your rates.
Software for planning and executing freight moves. Good at running loads, rarely built to show finance the numbers behind them.
The system of record for the business: orders, payables, the general ledger. Where freight data needs to end up, without a human re-keying it.
Every quote, tender, rate confirmation, and invoice in one verifiable record. The thing finance asks for that email can't produce.
The pipes that move data between systems. EDI is the older, batch-style standard. APIs move data as it happens. One of them explains your 5 pm spreadsheet.
On-time percentage, cost per lane, claims: one carrier at a time, on one screen. What annual rate-increase meetings become when you bring numbers.
Annual rate increases pass through unchallenged partly because the language around them is built to be hard to challenge. When "the market" becomes a benchmark and "the paperwork" becomes an audit trail, the conversation changes. That's the point of the whole platform.
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