Introducing the New TrakIT Portal for Customers and Transporters

Faster, clearer, and built for the people who move your cargo

Every shipment has more people involved than the logistics company that handles it. Customers want to know where their containers are and what they owe. Transporters want to see the moves assigned to them and get the paperwork right the first time. Until now, most of those questions ended in a phone call or an email to your operations team.

Today we are launching the new TrakIT Portal: a completely rebuilt, self-service web portal for your external users. It replaces the previous customer pages with a faster, cleaner experience that works just as well on a phone as on a desktop. It also introduces something we have been asked for many times: a dedicated view for transporters. 

A home page that answers the first question

When your customers sign in, the portal greets them with a summary of where things stand: how many jobs they have, how many work orders are still open, how many invoices are outstanding and how many bills are in progress. Each tile is one click away from the full list behind it.

If your team has set up dashboards for the account, the charts appear right on the home page too, for example work order and job volumes month by month. There is no separate screen to find.

For customers: every shipment, one click deep

Jobs and work orders

The Jobs screen lists every shipment your customer is a party to. They can search by transport document, container or manifest number, and filter by imports, exports or other job types. Columns can be sorted, and users can choose which columns they see and in what order, so the list shows what matters to them.

Opening a job shows its key details at the top, with tabs for:

• Work Orders: each container or load under the job, with a colour-coded status.
• Documents: download or preview the documents shared for the job.
• Comments: a conversation thread with your team, right next to the shipment it's about.

Track progress, step by step

Each work order has a clear Events timeline. Completed milestones get a green tick and a time. Upcoming ones show what is still to come. Customers can see at a glance that their empty was released, the unit stuffed and the gate-in done, without having to ask.

Where tracking data is available, a Location tab shows the route on a map. The Documents and Comments tabs are there too.

Invoices, without the back-and-forth

The Invoices screen lists every invoice with its date, due date, total and outstanding amount, and can be filtered to show only outstanding or paid invoices. Each invoice opens to show:

• its line items and taxes;
• a totals panel with the outstanding balance highlighted;
• any payments already received.

Where enabled, the official invoice PDF is one click away.

Customer and transporter at the same time? Many companies are both, for example a customer who also hauls some of its own containers. The portal handles this naturally. Those users simply see both Jobs and Work Orders in their menu. Each screen shows the records that match that relationship, with no need to switch accounts or pick a role at sign-in.

For vendors: submit and track your bills

Vendors and service providers can create a new bill directly in the portal:

1. Enter the bill number, date, currency and amounts.
2. Attach the scanned copy.
3. Submit it for processing.

From then on, they can follow its progress (Submitted, Received, Approved, or Rejected with the reason), see the payments made against it, and exchange comments with your accounts team.

Designed for every screen, including after dark

The new portal is fully responsive. On a phone, the menu folds away, the home tiles stack neatly, and lists scroll smoothly. Your users get the complete portal from any mobile browser, with nothing to install.

We've also added a Dark Mode switch to the profile menu. It changes the whole portal instantly, including charts, and TrakIT remembers the choice for the next visit. It's easier on the eyes in a dim control room or late in the evening.

Secure by design

The portal is built on the principle that each person should see their own business, and nothing else:

• Every record is checked, every time. Each user is linked to the companies they represent, and each link says how they relate to them: as a customer or as a transporter. Every screen and every download is checked against those links on every request.
• Roles decide what each user can see and do. For example: view invoices, post comments, submit bills, or download reports.
• Signing out really signs you out. Signing out ends the session and everything tied to it, so a forgotten browser tab or a copied link stops working the moment you leave.

Already bookmarked the old pages? No problem

Existing bookmarks and links keep working:

• Old addresses redirect automatically to the matching screen in the new portal.
• Links in notification emails and the QR codes printed on invoices take users straight to the right job, work order or invoice, even if they need to sign in first.

Users sign in exactly as before, with the same username, password and security steps.

Getting started

For portal users: simply sign in as usual. You'll land on the new portal automatically. If you don't see a section you expect, such as Invoices or Work Orders, contact your account representative and they can enable it for you.

For logistics companies using TrakIT: your administrators set up each external user in a few steps:

1. Give the user one portal role. The role decides which sections they see: Jobs, Work Orders, Invoices, Bills or Reports.
2. Link the user to their companies, and say for each link whether they deal with you as a Customer or as a Transporter.
3. Grant the Work Orders permission on the roles your transporter users hold.

That's it. From then on, the portal keeps each user's view up to date automatically.

We'd love to hear what you think of the new portal. Share your feedback with your TrakIT account manager or contact us. Watch this blog for more updates.

Bulk Actions, now for everyone

Closing two hundred work orders used to mean two hundred page loads — or a note to your system administrator. The new Bulk Actions page hands that job to whoever already has the rights to do it one at a time, and shows you every result as it lands.

What changed

The old Bulk Actions page lived under Admin > SysAdmin Pages and was exactly that - SysAdmin only. If you needed forty work orders closed at month-end, you raised it with someone who had the keys, and they ran it on your behalf.

That page has been retired. In its place is a page anyone can open, which decides what you may do by asking the same questions TrakIT asks when you close a single work order from its own screen: do you have the permission for this action, and can you see this record at all? Nothing new was unlocked. What changed is that you no longer need a middleman to use rights you already had.

The second change is how a run feels. The old page did the whole list in one round trip and showed you a block of text when it finished — no progress, no way to intervene. The new page processes one record at a time and writes each result to the screen the moment it completes, so you can watch it work and stop it if something looks wrong.

Where to find it

Two menu entries, both opening the same page on the tab you'd expect:

Operations › Bulk Operations › Bulk Actions — opens on Work Orders, alongside Bulk Create and Bulk Update.

Finance › Bulk Actions — opens on Finance Jobs, just under Accounts.

You can switch tabs once you're there, so it doesn't matter much which door you came through. If you only have rights on one side, you'll only ever see that one tab.

1) Paste your IDs

Work order IDs or job IDs, separated by whatever your source gave you - commas, semicolons, tabs, spaces, or one per line. A column straight out of Excel works as-is.

The count under the box updates as you type. Duplicates are collapsed, the order you typed is kept, and anything that isn't a number is called out and skipped rather than silently swallowed.

2) Pick the action

Actions you don't have permission for still appear in the list, marked (not permitted) and greyed out, with the reason shown underneath. You can see what the page offers even where you can't use it — which tells you what to ask for, instead of leaving you guessing why a menu is short.

3) Give a reason

A reason of at least three characters is required, and it is recorded against every single record the run touches. Cancelling a work order also asks for a Cancellation Reason from your standard reason list; Finance actions ask which Company you're acting for, limited to the companies you have access to.

4) Confirm, then watch

Start asks you to confirm, spelling out the action, the number of records and any option that widens what the run will push through. Then results begin appearing, one row per record, top to bottom.

A sample result for closing work orders is shown below:

What you can do

The same operations that exist on the work order and finance job screens are applied down a list. Each one enforces its own permission, exactly as it does when you run it singly.

Reserved for SysAdmins

Three things stay behind the administrator line, because each one pushes past a check the rest of TrakIT relies on:

Delete — the only action here that cannot be undone by running something else.

Bypass Custom Validations — skips the workflow validations your business has configured.

Force Close (Finance) — closes a job without the unapproved-invoice and unvalidated-bill checks.

For everyone else, these simply aren't on the page. Where an option is visible but unavailable, the page says why rather than leaving a dead control.

Only your records

Pasting an ID does not grant you anything. Every record in the list is checked against your own access before it is touched, using the same rules as the rest of TrakIT:

• Work orders are matched against the workflows assigned to you, plus any work order filter on your account and any custom SQL filter your company has set.
• Finance jobs are matched the same way the finance job screen matches them before it will open one.
• Companies in the Finance tab are limited to the offices you're linked to, plus your own.

An ID you have no access to comes back as Failed — Work Order not found or no permission — and the run carries on to the next one. So a list that mixes your records with a colleague's does the part that's yours and reports the rest, rather than failing wholesale.

Reading the results

Each row carries the ID as a link you can open in a new tab, the job number and container so you can recognise the record without clicking, the outcome, and the status the record ended up in.

A Success row means the action went through. A Failed row carries the reason next to it in the words TrakIT would have used on the record's own screen — WO is already closed, Cannot close job with unapproved invoices, Items not committed. Failures are information, not errors: a list assembled from a report will often contain records someone else already dealt with, and those rows tell you so.

Above the rows, five counters: Total, Done, Success, Failed and Elapsed. Success turns green and Failed turns red only once they're above zero, so a clean run reads as clean at a glance. Elapsed ticks in tenths of a second and stops the moment the run does.

When it's over, Copy Results puts the whole log on your clipboard, tab-separated — paste it straight into Excel.

Stopping a run

Stop halts the run after the record currently in flight. Anything still on the list is never attempted, and the final line tells you how many were left untouched.

Stop is not undo. Records already processed have already been changed and stay that way — there's no rollback. If you stop a run at 40 of 200, those 40 are done. Re-open or re-run as needed, but treat what's finished as finished.

This is also why the page works through the list one at a time rather than firing everything at once: a run you can see is a run you can stop before it gets where you didn't want it to go.

Limits and guard rails

4,999 records per run, and 99 for Reset, which is considerably heavier than the rest.

Every record is re-checked on its own. Status rules still apply — a work order that's already closed reports that instead of being closed twice, and a job that isn't approved yet can't be closed.

Everything is logged. One audit entry records the run — who, which action, and the full list of IDs — and each record keeps its own entry in its own history, with your reason attached, exactly as if you'd done it by hand.

Which is the short version of the whole design: a bulk run leaves the same trail as doing it one at a time, because underneath, that's precisely what it is.

For administrators

The two menu entries are added by a migration script that also removes the old Admin › SysAdmin Pages › Bulk Actions row, since that page no longer exists in the application.

No new permissions were introduced. If someone can close a work order from its own screen today, they can close a list of them tomorrow; if they can't, the page won't let them. Access is adjusted where it always was: in role permissions.

For any questions or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support.