Built in Australia
Australian freight rate card management.
Rate card management for forwarders quoting into Port Botany, Melbourne, Brisbane, Fremantle and Adelaide. Drop in the rate sheets your carriers, agents and depots send you — Lotic compiles them into a live rate card and prices quotations from it in Australian dollars.
The Australian end of a quote is where the lines pile up.
The ocean freight leg of an import quote is one number. The Australian destination side is a dozen, and they come from four different suppliers who each send their schedule in a different shape. Any forwarder quoting into Australia is holding, somewhere, current numbers for lines like:
- terminal handling charges and wharfage at the discharge port;
- port service and infrastructure charges, and ISPS or security fees;
- documentation, bill of lading and delivery order fees;
- customs entry and the import declaration processing charge;
- biosecurity inspection, and treatment or fumigation where it is called for;
- LCL unpack and deconsolidation at the depot;
- wharf cartage to the customer's door, by zone;
- container detention and demurrage once free time runs out.
Lotic does not publish any of these for you. It holds your numbers for them, from the schedules your own suppliers send, and keeps them current — which is the part a master spreadsheet does worst.
Rate card management for Australian forwarders.
The mechanism is the same one described on the rate card software page. What makes it fit Australian work is what it does not assume.
USD buy, AUD sell
Currency belongs to the rate line, so a card can hold ocean freight in USD alongside local charges in AUD, and the quotation still lands in the currency you quote your customer in.
No fixed port list
A lane exists because a rate line in your card covers it. Asia to Australia is the common case, but nothing in the product is limited to it.
Rates that lapse say so
Validity is part of the line, not a date in a filename. A card stops being priceable end to end when a component behind it expires, rather than quietly quoting yesterday's number.
Every schedule, as sent
The carrier's PDF, the agent's spreadsheet, the depot's emailed amendment. Parsed as they came, with each rate line traceable back to the document it came from.
FCL and LCL
Per-container rates and per-cubic-metre or per-tonne rates sit on the same card, with the charge basis carried on the line rather than implied by which tab it was on.
GST stays yours
Lotic prices the cost lines your card holds and applies your margin. How you treat GST across those lines is a decision about your business, and it stays one.
Australian rate card solutions, honestly described.
"Rate card solutions" covers a wide range of things, and it is worth being clear about which one this is. Lotic is not a rate marketplace, a benchmarking index, or a source of market data. It does not tell you what the going rate to Melbourne is this month.
It is a system for holding your rate cards accurately and pricing from them fast — the two things that decide whether a quote goes out in ten minutes at the right number or four hours later at a number nobody can reconstruct. If what you need is market intelligence, Lotic is the wrong tool. If what you need is for your own rates to stop living in a workbook only one person understands, it is the right one.
The three things it is built to remove:
- Re-keying. The supplier's file is the input, so nobody retypes a rate schedule into a workbook.
- Silent staleness. A lapsed rate is a visible state on the card, not a number that still calculates.
- Missed charges. Pricing pulls the components a shipment needs from the card, so a local charge is not forgotten because it lived on another tab.
Built here, not localised later.
Lotic is made in Australia by Beyond Borders Express. That matters less as a flag and more as a set of defaults: quotes assembled in AUD, an Australian import lane treated as the normal case rather than an edge one, and the destination-side charge structure above designed in from the start instead of bolted onto a system built for somewhere else.
Support runs on Australian hours, and the people building it are reachable at admin@lotic.sh. Lotic is in private beta; places open in small batches.
Frequently asked questions.
What is Australian rate card management?
It is keeping the buy rates an Australian forwarder quotes from — ocean freight, origin charges, and the local charges that land at an Australian port — as current, structured data rather than as a spreadsheet of re-keyed numbers. Australian in particular because the destination side of a quote here has its own shape: terminal handling, wharfage, customs entry, biosecurity inspection, and cartage from the wharf.
Does Lotic supply Australian port and carrier rates?
No, and that is deliberate. Lotic prices from your rate cards, built from the rate sheets your own carriers, agents and depots send you. Your buy rates are your commercial position, and a published schedule cannot tell you what your co-loader quoted you for Port Botany last week.
Which Australian ports does this cover?
Whichever ones your rate cards cover. In practice that is usually Port Botany, Melbourne, Brisbane, Fremantle and Adelaide on the Australian side, against North and Southeast Asian origins. Lotic does not ship a fixed port list — a lane exists because a rate line in your card covers it.
Does Lotic quote in Australian dollars?
Yes. Currency is part of the rate line, so a card can hold USD ocean freight alongside AUD local charges and the quotation is assembled in the currency you quote your customer in. Australian forwarders almost always quote AUD to the customer while buying at least part of the lane in USD.
How does Lotic handle GST on a quotation?
GST treatment is a property of your rates and how you bill, not something Lotic decides for you. It prices the cost lines your rate card holds and applies your margin; the tax treatment you apply to those lines is yours to set.
Is Lotic an Australian company?
Yes. Lotic is built in Australia by Beyond Borders Express, for the way Australian forwarders quote. Support runs on Australian hours, and the product was designed against Australian import lanes rather than adapted to them afterwards.
Be the first to quote.
Private beta. Places open in small batches.