TrakIT now keeps every rate you buy and sell in one place, and puts the right one on your quotations and job estimates in a click. No more hunting through spreadsheets, old emails and last month's quote to find out what a lane should cost.
Every rate in one place
Rates live on rate cards, and there are five kinds, named the way your team already talks:- Selling tariff - your standard prices for every customer without a contract
- Customer contract - prices agreed with one customer or a customer group
- Vendor rates - what carriers, airlines, transporters and agents charge you
- Spot rate - a one-off price with a short validity
- Surcharges - fuel, currency, security and other charges added on top
Each card is laid out like the rate sheet it came from: a price per container type for sea, weight breaks for air, one price per line for road or LCL. A card can serve one company or all of them, and covers every leg from pickup to delivery.
Prices change in versions. Editing a card opens a draft; publishing it sets the date it takes over and closes the previous version the day before. Nothing goes live until someone publishes it, and every version stays on record to compare or restore.
Quote in seconds
On a quotation or a job's estimates, press Get Rates. TrakIT reads the shipment - places, mode, containers, weight and volume - and prices every leg from the published cards. It picks the customer's own contract before the group's, the group's before your tariff, and the nearest place before a whole country.
- Chargeable weight for air and LCL: the greater of the actual weight and the volume at the card's ratio, with weight breaks applied (a higher break is used when it works out cheaper).
- Exchange rates from your company's own rate table, so a USD buy rate lands correctly on a local-currency job.
- Margin rules sell a cost on at a markup, a margin or a fixed amount, rounded the way you price, and flag any line below its minimum margin.
You see a preview first, with how every price was worked out. Lines someone priced by hand are kept unless you tick them, and lines already invoiced or billed are never touched. Find rates does the same for a shipment with no quotation yet, comparing vendors by cost, margin and transit time.
Rates that stay current
Keying in hundreds of lines is the hard part of any rate system, so TrakIT gives you several ways in:- Upload an Excel or CSV file, even a vendor's own layout. Match its columns once and TrakIT remembers them for that card and that vendor. Or paste rows straight from Excel into the grid.
- Email the file to TrakIT with the card's code in the subject, and the reply lists what happened to every row.
- SFTP: drop files in a shared folder and TrakIT picks them up every 30 minutes.
- API: send rates from another system as a file or as plain JSON lines.
Whichever way they arrive, every row is checked first, and the rates land in a draft only when all of them are right - publishing stays a person's decision. Bulk changes, such as raising a whole card by 5% or moving its validity, show a preview before they apply. And TrakIT emails a user group 30 and 7 days before a card's rates run out, so nobody quotes from expired prices.
Know where you stand
Three reports, each one click to Excel:- Missing rates - the lanes and charges your team still prices by hand on quotations and jobs, so you know which cards to build next.
- Cost variance - every vendor bill line against the contracted rate its estimate used, so overcharges stand out before you pay them.
- Commitments - volume promised under a contract (500 TEU a year, say) against what your jobs have actually moved, and whether you are on pace.
When a customer asks for your prices, send them a rate sheet: a clean PDF or Excel file of their contract or your tariff, with places by name, prices by container type or weight break, and the card's terms - nothing internal.
Getting started
You'll find it under Finance > Rate Management. Your administrator decides who can do what in Role Management: who may view, edit and publish cards, upload files, see buy rates and margins, set margin rules and use Get Rates. Buy rates stay hidden from anyone not given access to them.
The easiest start is one card you quote from every day: download its blank template, fill it in, upload it, publish it - and press Get Rates on your next quotation.
For further questions and guidance on Rate Management, please contact TrakIT Support.
