Introducing Rate Management in TrakIT

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.

Introducing User Groups

User Groups let you save a team of users once and pick that team as the recipient of an email, report, reminder or alert. When the team changes, you update the group in one place and everything that uses it follows.

At a Glance

Admin → User Groups shows the groups you belong to, the groups you can ask to join, and the archived ones.

Why User Groups?

If the same five people need a shipment alert, a daily report and a reminder, you would normally pick those five people each time. When someone joins or leaves the team, you have to find every place they are named and fix it. With a User Group you keep one list of people under one name, pick that name wherever a recipient is needed, and change the members once.

Examples: Import Operations, Claims Team, Finance Approvers.

Creating a User Group

You need permission to create groups: ask your administrator for User Groups (Create) in Role Management. If you do not see the New Group button, you do not have it yet.

1. Go to Admin → User Groups.
2. Click New Group.
3. Fill in the form:
   • Name: what people will see, for example "Import Operations". A name can be used once in your company.
   • Code: a short tag of 2 to 20 letters, digits or underscores, for example OPS_IMP. Event actions use it to name the group as [G-OPS_IMP]. The code cannot be changed later, so choose it with care.
   • Type: Operational, Project, Department or Notification-only. It helps you organize and filter groups and does not change how a group works.
   • Email: optional. Use it when the team has a shared mailbox or distribution list.
   • Email Recipients: who receives an email sent to the group (see below).
   • Visibility: who can see the group (see below).
   • Description: optional. Say what the group is for.
4. Click Create.
   
   
   
   
   
   

You become the owner of the group and its first member. A group belongs to one company, your own. A SysAdmin can create a group for any company and choose its owner.

Who receives the email: Email Recipients

• Group Email + Member Emails: the group's email address (if it has one) and every member receive the email.
• Group Email Only: only the group's email address receives it. Use this for a shared mailbox. An email address is required.
• Member Emails Only: every member receives it. The group's address is for information only.

Who can see the group: Visibility

• Visible: every internal user can see the group. Users of the group's company can ask to join, or the owner can add them.
• Private: only members can see the group. The owner adds people.
• Hidden: only the owner can see the group. Members see just its name in their own list, with a Leave button. The owner adds people.

SysAdmins can always see every group.

Adding members

Only the owner (or a SysAdmin) can add members.

1. In Admin → User Groups, click the group name to open it.
2. On the Members tab, click Add Members.
3. Search by name, user ID or email, tick the people you want, and click Add.

Each person you add is told by chat. Only internal users whose primary company is the group's company, and who are not locked, appear in the list.

To remove someone, click the x at the end of their row. The owner cannot be removed: transfer ownership first.

The Members tab shows each member, their company, when they were added and their status.

Members who will not receive messages

A member stays in the list but is skipped when messages are sent if they are locked, have moved to another company, or are an external user. The Status column says why, for example "Locked - not sent to". Everyone else shows Active.

Joining and leaving a group

1. Go to Admin → User Groups and open the All Groups tab.
2. Find a Visible group of your company and click Request to Join.
3. Add a short note for the owner if you like, and click Send Request.

The owner is emailed and can Approve or Decline from the group's request list, and you are told the outcome. Until then you can click Withdraw Request.

To leave a group, click Leave next to it. You can leave at any time. An owner must transfer ownership first.

What an owner can also do

• Edit: change the name, description, type, visibility, email and email option. The code and company stay as they are.
• Group icon: click the group's picture to upload one. It is cropped to a circle.
• Transfer Ownership: hand the group to another member, who is told by email and chat.
• Export: download the members as an Excel file, from one group or from the list.
• Action Log: a tab showing who did what and when: members added or removed, edits, requests, ownership changes and exports.
• Archive: retire a group you no longer need.
  
  
  
  
  

Archiving a group

Groups are archived, not deleted. An archived group sends to nobody, but it stays in the reports, reminders, actions and alerts that already name it, so nothing breaks. It cannot be picked in new places. Click Reactivate to bring it back as it was. Before you archive, the group page shows where the group is used, so you know which alerts will stop.

A user who owns a group cannot be deleted until the group is transferred to someone else.

Using a User Group as a recipient

Wherever you can choose users as recipients, you can choose a group instead. You can only choose groups you can see that are not archived.

• Event and data actions (Sequence Actions): in the recipient list, choose the group from the user group dropdown. It is added as [G-CODE]; you can also type it. Members receive the email, chat message or text, depending on the action.
• Advanced Reports: in the recipients box, enter the user group name, along with any user IDs or email addresses.
• Reminders for data fields (Scheduler): pick the user group in the recipients list, where it appears as 👥 Group name (Company).
• Location alerts (geofence triggers on a location): pick the group in the users list, also marked 👥. Everyone in the group is notified when the trigger fires.

In report recipients, a user group name shows in the Recipients column as below:
Similarly user groups can be added as recipients while setting up reminders for data fields and Location alerts for geofence triggers.

In Event / Data action, a user group name appear as [G-CODE] : 

A group picked as a recipient. Groups are marked with 👥.

Tips

• Name groups by purpose, not by person: Claims Alerts, not John's Team.
• Choose the code with care, because it cannot be changed.
• Keep a second person ready to take over as owner, in case the owner leaves.
• Use Notification-only groups for people who only need alerts.
• Check where a group is used before you archive it.

If a group does not appear where you expect it, it may be Private or Hidden, or archived. Ask the group's owner.

Questions? Write to TrakIT Support at support@trakit.in.

Ask TrakIT in plain words

You can now connect Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants to your TrakIT. Ask about your jobs, containers, invoices and reports in your own words, and get answers straight from your live TrakIT data.

What's new

TrakIT now has an MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the open standard AI assistants use to connect to other apps. Once you connect your assistant to TrakIT, it can look things up in TrakIT for you while you chat: find a job, check the latest event on a container, list overdue invoices, or count last month's TEU.

Safe By Design

Read-only. The assistant can look things up. It can't create, change or delete anything in TrakIT.

Your permissions, nothing more. It sees exactly what you see in TrakIT, with the same roles and filters. If you can't open something in TrakIT, the assistant can't read it either.

Switched on per person. Your TrakIT administrator decides who can connect an assistant.

Your normal TrakIT sign-in. You sign in on a TrakIT page, with two-factor codes if your company uses them. Your password is never given to the AI.

Recorded and reversible. Every request is logged, and you can disconnect at any time.

Before you start

You need three things:

• AI access in TrakIT. Ask your TrakIT administrator to enable AI access on your TrakIT profile.
• An assistant that supports custom connectors. Claude works on every plan (the free plan allows one custom connector). ChatGPT needs a Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu plan.
• The TrakIT connector address: https://mcp.trakit.in/mcp

Connect Claude

In Claude, open Settings and go to Connectors.

1. Click Add custom connector. Enter the name TrakIT and the address https://mcp.trakit.in/mcp , then click Add.
2. Click Connect next to TrakIT and sign in (see Signing in below).
3. In a chat, click +, open Connectors and make sure TrakIT is switched on. Then ask your question.

Connect ChatGPT

1. In ChatGPT, open Settings → Apps & Connectors → Advanced and turn on Developer mode.
2. In Apps & Connectors, click Create. Enter the name TrakIT, the connector URL https://mcp.trakit.in/mcp and authentication OAuth, then click Create.
3. Sign in to TrakIT when ChatGPT asks you to.

Signing in

When you connect, a TrakIT sign-in page opens. Its address starts with https://mcp.trakit.in.

1. Enter your TrakIT address, the one you use to open TrakIT in your browser (for example yourcompany.trakit.in or trakit.yourcompany.com ), and click Continue.
2. Sign in the way you normally do: click Continue with Google or Continue with Microsoft, or enter your TrakIT user ID or email and password and click Sign in. Your company decides which of these are offered.
3. If TrakIT asks for a verification code (for TFA), enter it and click Verify.
4. Check what the assistant will be able to read, and click Allow.

You're taken back to your assistant, and you're connected. From time to time you may be asked to sign in again.

What you can ask

Ask the way you'd ask a colleague. If you work in more than one TrakIT company, say which one. Here are some examples:

Jobs and shipments

• Show my open jobs created this week.
• Find the job for container MSKU1234565.
• List last month's export jobs for Acme Traders.

Tracking

• What's the latest status of job BL-26-0117?
• Has the vessel arrived? What's the ETA?
• Which milestones are still pending on its containers?

Customers and partners

• Find our customer Acme Traders.
• Which shipping lines do we have in TrakIT?
• Which clearing agents do we have in TrakIT?

Invoices and bills [Finance access required]

• Which sales invoices are overdue?
• How much does Acme Traders still owe us?
• Show the unpaid supplier bills for job BL-26-0117.

Job profit · [Finance access required]

• What's the profit on job BL-26-0117?
• Which costs make up the expenses on this job?
• Is the finance on this job approved or closed yet?

Reports and trends

• How many jobs did we open each month this year? Show it as a chart.
• Compare our TEU this quarter with last quarter.
• Which customers have the most open work orders right now?

You can also combine questions: "Prepare a short summary of this week's operations for my manager" or "Which of our biggest customers have overdue invoices?" What you can ask about depends on your TrakIT role. For example, invoices and job profit need finance access in TrakIT.

Tips for better answers

• Use job, container or invoice numbers when you have them.
• Ask for a table or a chart when you want one.
• Ask follow-up questions. The assistant remembers the conversation.
• Check important figures in TrakIT before you act on them. AI assistants can make mistakes.

Good to know

Your questions, and the TrakIT data the assistant reads to answer them, are handled by the AI provider you use (for example Anthropic for Claude or OpenAI for ChatGPT), like anything else you type into that assistant. Follow your company's policy on AI tools.

The connection stays until you disconnect it or your administrator turns off your AI access.

To disconnect, remove TrakIT under Settings → Connectors in Claude, or Apps & Connectors in ChatGPT.

If something doesn't work

"Couldn't determine how this server signs in"

Check the address. It must end in /mcp: https://mcp.trakit.in/mcp.

"Your TrakIT account doesn't have AI access"

Ask your TrakIT administrator to tick AI under Access on your user.

The assistant answers without using TrakIT

Make sure TrakIT is switched on for the chat, or mention TrakIT in your question.

You don't know your TrakIT address

It's the address you use to open TrakIT in your browser, such as yourcompany.trakit.in.

This is a new experience for us as well - and the first release of the TrakIT MCP Gateway. Please connect with the TrakIT Support team if you have suggestions or questions that the AI can't answer or is answering incorrectly. We'll do our best to improve the performance and accuracy.

Sign finance documents on the spot with Live Signature

Invoices, quotations, bills and vouchers can now carry a signature drawn right in TrakIT, with a mouse, a pen or a finger, before the PDF is generated. There is no printing, signing and scanning: the signature and the time it was given go straight into the document.

At a Glance

The template's signature box waits in the preview; after Confirm, the drawn signature and its time take its place, exactly as they will print.

How signing works

Signing happens in the same Generate window you already use, in the preview of the document.

1. Open the document and click Generate (or Pro-Forma, Approve, Generate PDF), then pick the template.
2. The preview shows a dashed "Sign Here" box where the signature belongs.
3. Sign inside the box with your mouse, a pen, or your finger on a tablet or phone.
4. Click Confirm to keep it, or Clear to start again.
5. The box is replaced by your signature, with the time underneath, for example 14:05, 25 Sep 2026.
6. Click Generate. The PDF carries the signature exactly where the box was.

Changed your mind after Confirm? Click the signature to sign again. If Generate stops on another problem, such as a mistyped email address, your confirmed signature is kept while you fix it.

Setting it up on a template

Any finance template can take a signature: invoices, debit and credit notes, invoice documents, quotations, bills, and receipt or payment vouchers. Two steps in Admin → Form Definitions:

1. In the form content, place the signature box where the signature should appear: <div class="LiveSign"></div>. It is 280 x 90 by default; give it a width and height in its style to change that. Text inside the box, such as "Customer Signature", shows as a small caption.
2. Edit the template header and turn on Require Live Signature.

TrakIT checks the template as you save it. The switch only turns on when the content has exactly one signature box, and while it is on, the box cannot be deleted from the content by accident. The box belongs in the form content itself, not in the header, the footer or a section that is hidden from print.

Required or optional

The switch decides whether a signature is a must or a choice. A template with the box but without the switch still offers the signing pad. Either way, a signature that has been drawn but not confirmed stops Generate with a reminder, so a signature is never dropped by mistake.

Good to know

• The time is yours and it is checked. It is shown in the time zone of your TrakIT profile, the same as the "Generated By" line, and TrakIT confirms it on its own clock.
• Every signed PDF is recorded. The user action log notes the template, the user who generated the PDF, the signing time and a fingerprint of the signature image.
• Each document is signed fresh. A signature belongs to the one PDF it was given for, so regenerating a document asks for a new one.
• Some documents have no preview to sign in. The credit note created when an invoice is reversed is one; templates that require a signature are not offered there.
• It is a drawn signature. It shows the signature and when it was given, like ink on paper. It is not a certificate-based digital signature.

For any questions or concerns, or for any assistance in setting up the signature box, contact TrakIT Support.

Finance and Management Emails for Entities

Every entity in TrakIT now has three sets of email addresses: General, Finance and Management. Invoices can go to the accounts team while job updates keep going to operations, without workarounds.

The entity edit page now shows three email boxes side by side. Each takes one or more addresses, separated by a comma or a new line.

• General Emails is the email field you already use, under a clearer name. Nothing in it changes.
• Finance Emails is for invoices, statements and payment reminders.
• Management Emails is for the people who should get reports and summaries.

Wherever TrakIT emails an entity, you choose which of the three to send to, and you can tick more than one. An email address listed in two categories receives the email only once. If every category you chose is empty for an entity, TrakIT sends to its General addresses, so nobody is left out.

Where you can choose

Look for General, Finance and Management tick boxes in these places. In the 'send' dialogs, each category also lists its addresses, and a category with no addresses is greyed out.

Where	What you choose	Ticked by default
Event/Data Actions	Entity Emails, for Send Email and Send Documents actions once an entity is picked	General
Advanced Report Subscriptions	Entity Emails, once an Entity Type Subscription is set	General
Broadcast Messages	Entity Emails, under Entity Type	General
Reminders	The categories next to Notify Entity	General
Invoices/Credit Notes	The customer's categories when you generate and email the document	Finance
Receipt Vouchers	The customer's categories when you generate the voucher	Finance
Finance Documents Email	Individual addresses, each labelled with its category	Finance
Quotations	The customer's categories when you generate the quotation	General
Job Documents (Email Docs)	Categories for each party: customer, transporter, freight forwarder and clearing agent	General
Forms (Generate PDF & Email)	Categories for each party on the job	General

When a Finance default is set but the entity has no Finance addresses, General is ticked instead.

Sent automatically

Some emails TrakIT sends on its own now go to the Finance addresses first, and to General when Finance is empty:

• Outstanding invoice payment reminders.
• The contact email sent to your accounting system (Xero or QuickBooks) when entities sync.

Operational emails stay on General: job status updates, pending document reminders and comment notifications.

Getting started

1. Open an entity, click Edit, and fill in Finance Emails and Management Emails.
2. Open an action, report subscription, reminder or broadcast that emails entities, and tick the categories it should use.
3. Send an invoice as usual: the Finance addresses are already ticked.

You can see all three fields on the entity page, in the entity list and in its export. The Email filter on the entity list searches all three.

To fill the fields in bulk, add Finance Email and Management Email columns to your entity import sheet, next to General Email (a column named Email still works).

Form and template designers can print the new addresses with these codes:

Code	Prints
##ENTFINEMAIL##	The entity's Finance addresses
##ENTMGMTEMAIL##	The entity's Management addresses
##INVTOFINEMAIL##	The invoiced entity's Finance addresses
##INVTOMGMTEMAIL##	The invoiced entity's Management addresses

The entity codes also take a party suffix, such as ##ENTFINEMAIL|TRANS## for the transporter, just like ##ENTEMAIL##.



For any questions or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support.

Interactive Reports, rebuilt: every report on one page

The Interactive Reports page in TrakIT has been rebuilt from the ground up. Every report now opens on one page, every figure leads to the records behind it, and nine new reports cover operations, KPIs and finance.

One page for every report

Pick a report from the list on the left panel, set its filters and press Run report. The results appear right there: summary tiles, a chart and a table. Each table row expands from the workflow, customer, period or person into its detail, and every column sorts.

Filters carry over from one report to the next, so you choose your workflows once and move between reports freely. The page remembers your choices in your browser. Under each table, a short note says exactly what the report counts.

Sixteen reports, nine of them new

The seven reports from the old page are rebuilt, and nine new ones join them in four sections. Finance reports appear only to people with the finance permissions their figures need.

From any figure to the records behind it

Every underlined figure opens the list behind it: the work orders, jobs, charges or invoices that make up the number. Bars in the charts work the same way. A breadcrumb shows where you came from, and the browser's Back button takes you back to the summary.

Both views export to Excel, with the filters you used at the top of the sheet. A report exports as a Summary sheet plus a Detail sheet, with one row per item, ready to filter and pivot. A drill-down exports its whole list, up to 50,000 rows, with numbers and dates kept as numbers and dates.

Finance figures in one currency

Finance reports run for one company at a time, and every amount is shown in that company's currency. Jobs and invoices in other currencies are converted at one rate each: the latest exchange rate on or before the report's end date. The rates used are listed under the summary with their dates, and a rate more than three months old is flagged.

A currency with no exchange rate is never added in unconverted. Its amounts are left out and the currency is named, so a missing rate is easy to spot and add. Amounts are before tax, and disbursements recharged to customers are kept apart from revenue and margin.

If you used the old page

The page is where it was, under Reports > Interactive, with the same permission, and bookmarks to the old address still open it. The popup windows are gone: every report and drill-down opens in the page itself.

A few figures read differently now:

• User Engagement counts each update once. The old report counted some event updates twice, so WOs updated and Events updated are lower than before. It also runs much faster.
• User Engagement's average days to update covers the events each person entered in the period, the same way Event Update Delay measures it.
• Delay Tracking Statistics shows demurrage in each workflow's own currency, with a total per currency instead of one mixed sum.
• Include locked users in User Engagement now does what it says.
• Job Status starts on active work orders only; tick the other statuses to include them.

As always, please contact TrakIT Support for any questions or concerns. We'd be happy to receive feedback and suggestions.

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.

One Work Order - Its Own Books

Every job in TrakIT has one finance page for all of its work orders combined. That's exactly right when you're closing out the job - and exactly wrong when you only want to know whether this container is running a loss. Work Order Finance is a new page built for the second question.

Why this Exists

A job's finance page is comprehensive by design: every estimate, every actual, every account, laid out line by line. That's the right tool for approving a job or reconciling its books end-to-end. It's the wrong tool for a narrower, more common question - how is this one work order doing?

On a job with sixteen containers and forty line items, finding the handful of rows that belong to one of them means scanning a search box, squinting at the WO column, or exporting to a spreadsheet and filtering there. Work Order Finance is that filtered view, given its own page and its own address.

What's on the page?

Open a work order's finance page, and it reads like its job-level counterpart, because the intent is the same: a summary up top, working detail in tabs below - just narrowed to one work order throughout.

• Work Order Information -Workflow, customer, commodity, weight, transporter, and whatever else matters most. The fields aren't fixed in code - an office or role can configure its own set, the same way column choices work everywhere else in TrakIT.
• Account Summary - Income, expenses, gross margin, required margin, disbursements - estimate against actual - totalled from this work order's accounts only.
• Estimates & Actuals - The full toolkit: add, edit, approve, hide, duplicate, tax, quick-edit, drag to reorder. Add an account here and it already belongs to this work order - nothing left to pick.
• Analyse - Account master and category summaries, scoped the same way as everything above.
• Audit Log - Who changed what, filtered to this work order's accounts - not the job's.
• PDF - Print or download a copy laid out the same way as the screen.

Every total on this page, and every account you add from it, belongs to one work order. Nothing here reaches into the rest of the job - and nothing from the rest of the job leaks in. The job still holds all of it. Work Order Finance just gives one branch of that tree a door of its own.

What stays on the job page

A few things are deliberately missing here, because they were never really about one work order:

• Job status & approvals
• Request approval, close, cancel, reopen - a job moves through one status, not six.
• Customer credit rating
• A property of the customer, not the shipment leg.
• Comments, invoices, bills, documents

These live where they were created - at the job level - and Work Order Finance links straight back to all of it.

Getting there

Every work order page now carries a WO Finance link alongside the existing Job Finance one. Follow it, and the address settles at /wofin-[id] - as direct as the page itself. Access follows the same finance permissions as the job page, narrowed by whatever work order filters already apply to your account: if you can't see a work order today, you won't see its finance page either.

Make it yours

The Work Order Information panel runs on the same column system as TrakIT's list pages. An administrator can add fields, remove them, reorder them, or set a different default for a particular office or workflow group - from the existing column admin screen, under Finance WO Info. Nothing about the panel is fixed except the mechanism for building it.

For any questions or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support.

Built for How Freight Forwarders Actually Work: Inside TrakIT's Approach to Workflow, Automation, and Africa's Complexity

Every freight forwarder eventually hits the same wall with off-the-shelf logistics software: the platform was built for someone else's business.

Maybe it assumes a workflow you don't follow. Maybe it charges more every time you add a team member. Maybe it was designed for a market where customs documentation is uniform and predictable - and then falls apart the moment you're routing a shipment through three countries with three different regulatory regimes.

TrakIT was built to solve that problem from day one, in the market where it matters most: Africa. Today it supports freight forwarders across 50+ countries, with deep, battle-tested coverage across 30+ African markets - and everything about the platform, from its workflow engine to its pricing model, reflects the lessons learned getting logistics software right in the world's most operationally complex trade corridors.

Your Workflow, Not a Template

Most logistics platforms give you a fixed process and ask you to adapt your business to fit it. TrakIT does the opposite.

Its workflow engine was designed around a simple reality: no two freight forwarders operate identically, and a forwarder moving goods through Lagos, Mombasa, and Douala can't run the same approval chain, documentation sequence, or exception-handling process as one working purely intra-Europe. Multi-country regulatory complexity isn't an edge case for TrakIT - it's the foundation the architecture was built on.

That means you can configure workflows around how your operations, compliance, and documentation teams actually work - not the other way around. Custom approval stages, conditional routing based on shipment type or destination, role-specific task assignment, and country-specific documentation requirements are all things you configure, not things you request from a vendor roadmap and wait months for.

Reporting That Runs Itself

Ask any ops manager what eats their week, and "pulling reports" is near the top of the list. TrakIT's reporting automation is built to take that off your plate entirely - scheduled reports generated and distributed automatically, so your team, your clients, and your partners get the visibility they need without anyone manually exporting a spreadsheet at 6pm on a Friday.

Because the platform understands shipment data natively, reports aren't static exports - they reflect the real-time state of your operations, filtered and formatted for whoever's reading them: a client wants shipment status, your finance team wants revenue by lane, your ops lead wants exception flags. Same underlying data, automatically shaped for each audience.

Automation That Actually Reduces Work

TrakIT's automated actions go beyond reminders. The platform can trigger real operational events based on rules you define - status updates cascading through a shipment's lifecycle, notifications firing when a milestone is hit or missed, documents routing to the right person the moment they're uploaded. It's the difference between software that tells you something needs attention and software that handles it.

Two features stand out here, both born from real forwarder pain points:

OCR bill of lading extraction - pull structured data directly from BOL documents instead of manually keying it in, cutting a slow, error-prone step out of your process entirely.

Natural language shipment queries - ask TrakIT a question the way you'd ask a colleague ("which Mombasa shipments are delayed past 5 days?") instead of hunting through filters and dashboards.

Integrations Without the Integration Headache

Freight forwarding doesn't happen in one system - it happens across carriers, customs platforms, client portals, and internal finance tools. TrakIT is built to connect to that ecosystem rather than compete with it, with an integration architecture designed to plug into the carrier and customs systems you already depend on. The goal isn't to make you migrate everything to one walled garden - it's to make TrakIT the operational hub that ties the systems you already use together.

Pricing That Scales the Way You Do

Here's where TrakIT breaks from almost every competitor in the space: no per-user fees. Add your whole documentation team, bring on seasonal staff, give your finance department visibility - none of it adds to your bill. For forwarders running lean, growing teams, or seasonal operations (which describes most of the industry), this alone changes the economics of adopting proper logistics software.

Why This Matters Most in Africa

Africa's freight forwarding market has historically been underserved by logistics software built for simpler, more homogeneous trade lanes. Multi-jurisdictional documentation, inconsistent customs digitisation, and highly variable regulatory requirements from country to country have made "off-the-shelf" software a poor fit for forwarders operating across the continent.

TrakIT was shaped by exactly that complexity - not adapted to it after the fact. That's the difference between a platform that tolerates African market conditions and one that was actually designed around them.

See It on Your Own Operations

The best way to understand what a purpose-built platform feels like is to see it against your own workflows, your own shipment volumes, and your own team structure.

Ready to see TrakIT in action? Request a demo, and we'll walk through how it fits your operation - no per-user pricing surprises, no generic sales pitch, just a real look at whether it's the right fit.

Faster searches with "Skip Count"

TrakIT features a new Skip Count checkbox in the filter panel on the Operations and Finance Jobs pages (located just to the left of the Search button) designed to significantly speed up slow searches.

How TrakIT Searches Work

Normally, every search triggers two separate database queries:

1. Count Query: Counts every matching row to determine the total (e.g., “1,482 Found”) and calculates pagination. This can be slow on broad searches because the database must scan every matching record.
2. Data Query: Fetches the specific rows for the current page (e.g., the first 20 records). This is typically very fast.

Enabling Skip Count bypasses the first query entirely, delivering your results instantly without waiting for a total count.

What Changes When “Skip Count” is Enabled

• Pagination Limited to One Page: With no total count, the pager displays only a single page with no “next” option. Sorting and filtering continue to work normally. Note: You can select “Rows per page” (i.e. 20, 50, 100, 200) from the dropdown placed at the bottom of the result table.
• Estimated Results Label: The results label changes from an exact count to “20+ Found” (indicating at least that many, and likely more). If fewer rows match than fit on a page, it displays the exact count (e.g., “12 Found”).
• Export Restrictions on Operations: Export is temporarily hidden on Operations while the box is ticked (as exports require a real total to verify size limits). Finance Job exports remain unaffected.

When to Use It

• Use it when you need a fast result for a specific item sorted near the top (newest jobs, highest value, etc.) and the grand total doesn't matter.
• Leave it off when you need to measure data (e.g., “how many jobs are still open?”), plan to export data, or need to browse through multiple pages of results.
• Pro Tip: If a search is running slowly, tick the box to quickly confirm you have the right rows, refine your filters, and then untick it once your search criteria are narrow enough.

Profile preferences

Your preference is saved to your user profile so it stays active the next time you open the page. Operations and Finance Job pages remember this setting separately. If you see “20+ Found” unexpectedly, check the filter panel to see if the box is still ticked from a previous session.

For any questions or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support.

Export Exactly What You Need: The New Work Order Export

Exporting work-order data in TrakIT was never one-size-fits-all - you could already compose your own export and pick which columns to include. But the old experience was clunky, and once you'd chosen your fields, there was little you could do with them: no control over formatting, no alignment, no choice of which aspect of a field to pull. The redesigned Work Order Export keeps the composable foundation and rebuilds everything around it. The result is faster to work with and genuinely customisable down to the individual column - you choose the fields, their order, their format, and how the file is delivered, and TrakIT remembers it all for next time.

Here's how it works and why it matters.

It starts with your filters

The export always reflects what you're already looking at. When you filter the job list down to the work orders you care about - a customer, a workflow, a date range, a status - and click Export, TrakIT carries your exact query into the export. There's no re-selecting records and no risk of exporting the wrong set. If nothing matches, or you've selected more work orders than your organisation's limit allows, TrakIT tells you up front rather than producing an empty or oversized file.

A two-panel composer

The export window is split into two panels:

Available Fields (left) - everything you can add, organised into four tabs.

Selected Fields (right) - the columns your export will actually contain, in order.

Click any available field to add it; drag rows in the selected list to reorder them. The Work Order ID is always included as the first column, so every export is traceable back to the source record.

Four kinds of data, one export

The available fields are grouped into four tabs, each searchable with a live count:

Header - core work-order attributes: customer, shipper, transporter, origin and destination, container number and size, status, dates, and dozens more.

Events - operational milestones from the workflow.

Data - the custom data fields captured against your work orders.

KPIs - calculated performance metrics.

Mixing all four in a single file means one export can answer a question that used to require stitching several reports together.

Control every column

This is where the "composed" part earns its name. Each selected column carries its own settings:

Option - for Events and Data fields, you don't just get the value. You can pull the Value, the Remarks, Updated On, or Updated By. Want both the milestone date and who recorded it? Add the same field twice with two different options. For KPIs, you choose Hours or Days.

Format - apply an Excel format string like #,##0.00 for numbers or dd-MMM-yyyy for dates, so the file arrives report-ready.

Alignment - left, center, or right per column.

You can compose up to 30 fields per export - enough for a rich report, while keeping files fast to generate and easy to read.

Choose how it's delivered

When you're done, pick your delivery method:

Download Now - the file is generated and downloaded immediately. Perfect for quick, everyday pulls.

Send Email - TrakIT builds the file in the background and emails it to you, closing the window right away. Ideal for large exports, so you're never left watching a spinner or tying up your session.

Your layout is saved automatically

The columns you choose, their order, formats, alignment, and your preferred delivery method are all saved to your profile. The next time you open the export, your composition is already there. 

The benefits, in short

• Self-service reporting. Build the exact report you need without waiting on a custom development request or a new template.
• One file, four data domains. Header attributes, events, custom data, and KPIs together - no more merging spreadsheets by hand.
• More than just values. Pulling Updated On and Updated By alongside a value gives you a built-in audit trail: not just what happened, but when and who recorded it.
• Presentation-ready output. Column order, number/date formats, and alignment are baked in, so the file is ready to share the moment it lands.
• Consistency across reports. Saved layouts mean recurring reports look the same every time - no drift, no rebuilding.
• Built to scale. Background email delivery handles large pulls gracefully, while system limits and a 30-field cap keep exports fast and your environment healthy.
• Speaks your language. Column names reflect your organisation's configured terminology (your own labels for customer, shipper, transporter, and more), so the output matches how your team actually talks about the business.

A few tips

• Search before you scroll. Each tab has a search box - type a few letters to jump straight to the field you want.
• Use two options on one field when you need both the data and its provenance (e.g., an event's value and who updated it).
• For big date ranges, choose Send Email. Let TrakIT do the heavy lifting in the background while you carry on working.

The new Work Order Export replaces a rigid, one-size-fits-all download with a flexible report builder that remembers your preferences and adapts to your workflow. Filter, compose, and export - exactly what you need, every time.

For any questions, as always, please contact Support.

Introducing Lead Management in TrakIT

Your sales pipeline starts with a lead - and TrakIT's CRM module gives you everything you need to track it from first contact to closed deal.

Creating and Organising Leads

Every lead in TrakIT captures the full picture of an opportunity: the company name and primary contact, their designation, phone, email, website, address, and country. You can also attach an estimated deal value with currency, a probability percentage (0-100), and an expected close date - all the information your team needs to prioritise their day.

Each lead is automatically assigned a unique code in the format LEAD-YYYY-NNNNN, so referencing it in emails, notes, or conversations is unambiguous.

When creating a lead, you also select:

• Lead Source - where the opportunity came from (e.g. Referral, Website, Cold Call). Sources are fully configurable by administrators and can be grouped by channel type.
• Lead Stage - the current step in your sales process. Stages are colour-coded and are also administrator-defined, so they reflect your team's actual workflow rather than a generic template.
• Rating - Hot, Warm, or Cold. A quick visual signal for how urgent an opportunity is.
• Assigned To - the team member responsible for this lead, along with the responsible office.

Moving Through the Pipeline

As a lead progresses, use Change Status to move it to the next stage. Every status change is recorded in a Stage History log - so you can always see who moved a lead, from which stage, and when. This gives managers a clear view of velocity and helps teams identify where deals tend to stall.

Multiple Contacts per Lead

Real deals involve more than one person. On a lead's Contacts tab, you can add as many contacts as needed - each with their own name, designation, phone, email, and social/LinkedIn URL. Mark one as the primary contact so your team always knows who to call first.

Activities, Comments, and Attachments

The lead detail page is organised into tabs so related information stays grouped and accessible:

• Activities - log calls, meetings, follow-ups, and other sales activities directly against a lead.
• Comments - leave internal notes for your colleagues without cluttering the main record.
• Attachments - upload proposals, contracts, brochures, or any relevant documents.
• Action Log - a full audit trail of every change made to the lead, including who made it and when.
• Custom extra fields configured for your office also appear on the lead, letting you capture any information specific to your business.

Converting a Won Lead

When a deal closes, TrakIT makes the handoff seamless. Once a lead reaches a Won status, a Convert button appears. Converting a lead creates a full Entity record (Customer, Prospect, or any other entity type you use) pre-populated with the lead's company details. All contacts from the lead are copied across automatically - no re-entry needed.

Once converted, the lead is locked and linked to the new entity, preserving the history while your operations team picks up the relationship.

The Contacts Page

The CRM Contacts page gives you a single place to browse and manage all contacts across every lead and entity in the system - useful when you need to find a person without knowing exactly which record they belong to.

Filter contacts by:

• Name, email, or phone number
• Type - Lead contacts or Entity contacts
• Primary contacts only (useful when you need decision-makers fast)

Each row shows the contact's parent lead or entity as a clickable link so you can jump straight to the record. Click any contact to open an edit panel where you can update their details or remove them if needed.

Filter settings are remembered between sessions, so your Contacts view picks up where you left off.

Lead Management in TrakIT is designed to keep your team aligned and your pipeline moving - from the first enquiry through to a closed, converted customer.

For any questions or concerns, please contact TrakIT Support. We are open to feedback and suggestions.