02 · Rate cards
Freight rate card software that reads what your carriers actually send.
Not a template you have to fill in. Drop in the PDFs and spreadsheets your suppliers email you, and Lotic compiles them into a live rate card — flagging the lines it isn't sure about instead of quietly guessing at them.
Nobody sends rates in your format.
A forwarder's buy rates arrive from twenty directions in twenty shapes. A carrier's quarterly schedule as a forty-page PDF. An agent's spreadsheet with merged cells and a legend. A co-loader's numbers typed straight into an email. A revised surcharge as a one-line amendment referring to a document from March.
The usual answer is a master workbook, hand-keyed, with a tab per supplier — and that workbook has predictable failure modes:
- It goes stale invisibly. A rate expired but the cell still holds a number, and the number still prices a quote.
- It only exists in one head. The person who built it knows which tab wins when two disagree. Nobody else does.
- Re-keying introduces errors. Every transcription is a chance to drop a digit or a currency, and nothing checks it.
- Surcharges get missed. They live somewhere other than the base rate, so they are the first thing forgotten under time pressure.
Rate card software is worth having only if it takes the sheets as they come. If it needs the data cleaned first, you have kept the hard part and added a system.
From supplier document to live rate card.
The files you were sent
PDF schedules, spreadsheets, amendments. They stay attached to the card as source documents, so any line can be traced back to the document it came from.
Read, not template-matched
Lotic reads the document and pulls out rate lines — charge, basis, amount, currency, validity — rather than expecting a layout it has seen before.
What it isn't sure about
Ambiguous lines become alerts against the card instead of confident guesses. The card is marked needs review until they are cleared.
Corrected in plain English
You resolve an alert by saying what the line should be, in the chat beside the card. The change is applied and the alert clears.
Priceable end to end
Once nothing is outstanding the card goes green: every component a quote on those lanes needs is present and in date.
Quotes price from it
Pricing pulls the components a shipment needs across six cost modules — origin charges, ocean freight, destination charges and the rest — applies your margin, and the quotation is ready within seconds.
An alert is better than an answer.
The temptation with any document-reading system is to make it look confident. A rate card that always parses cleanly is a rate card you cannot trust, because the cases it got wrong look identical to the cases it got right.
Lotic is built the other way round. Where a line is ambiguous — a charge basis that could be per container or per bill of lading, a currency that isn't stated, a validity window that refers to another document — it says so and holds the card back from active. The two-minute review is the point; it is much cheaper than the quote you send at the wrong number.
It also means the card carries a real status. Needs review · 2 alerts is information. A spreadsheet has no equivalent: it is never wrong, it just contains whatever it contains.
Rate cards in a spreadsheet, and rate cards in Lotic.
| Master spreadsheet | Lotic rate card | |
|---|---|---|
| Getting rates in | Re-keyed by hand from the supplier's file | The supplier's file is the input |
| Validity | A date in a filename or a note in a cell | Part of the rate line; the card knows when it lapses |
| Uncertainty | Invisible — a wrong cell looks like a right one | An alert on the card, blocking it from going active |
| Provenance | Whoever typed it remembers, or doesn't | Every line traces to the source document it came from |
| Corrections | Edit the cell, hope nothing downstream breaks | Describe the change in plain English; it is applied to the card |
| Producing a quote | Copy the lines you remember needing into a template | Priced automatically across six cost modules, with your margin |
Frequently asked questions.
What is freight rate card software?
A rate card is the set of buy rates and charges a forwarder prices from — ocean freight per container, origin and destination charges, surcharges, and the validity dates attached to each. Rate card software holds those as structured data instead of spreadsheet cells, so a quotation can be priced from them automatically rather than assembled by hand.
Can Lotic read the rate sheets my carriers send?
Yes. Drop in the files your suppliers send and Lotic parses them into a live rate card. Where it isn't confident about a line it raises an alert rather than guessing, and you resolve it in plain English.
What happens when a rate sheet is in a format Lotic has not seen?
That is the normal case — every carrier and agent lays a rate sheet out differently. Lotic reads the document rather than matching a template, so a new layout is not a blocker. Lines it cannot read with confidence become alerts against the card, and the card is not marked priceable end to end until those are resolved.
How do I correct a line Lotic got wrong?
In plain English, in the chat beside the card. You describe what the line should be and the change is applied to the rate card — no formula editing and no hunting for the cell that feeds three other tabs.
Does Lotic use public market rates or index data?
No. Quotations are priced from your own rate cards, which is the point. Your buy rates are your commercial position — a public index cannot tell you what your agent in Xiamen quoted you last week.
What about rates that have expired?
Validity is part of the rate line rather than a note in a filename, so a card can tell you it is no longer priceable end to end. Quoting from a rate that lapsed last Thursday is one of the most expensive things a spreadsheet lets you do silently.
Be the first to quote.
Private beta. Places open in small batches.