For freight forwarders
Software for freight forwarders who still quote from a spreadsheet.
Lotic reads the enquiry in your inbox, prices it against your own rate cards, and hands you a quotation ready to send — usually within minutes of the email arriving. Leads, rates and quotes live in one workspace instead of three.
Quoting is the job. Most software treats it as an afterthought.
Ask a forwarder where the day goes and the answer is rarely the shipment. It is the forty enquiries sitting in a shared inbox, the rate sheet that arrived as a PDF this morning, the workbook with a tab per carrier that only one person really understands, and the quote that went out four hours after the customer asked for it.
The large forwarding platforms are built for the operational half — bookings, milestones, customs, tracking. That is real work, but it starts after someone has already won the shipment. The quoting half tends to be left to a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is where the margin quietly leaks:
- a rate card that expired last Thursday and nobody noticed;
- a surcharge left off because it lives on a different tab;
- the same lane quoted at two different numbers by two people in the same week;
- an enquiry that was never answered because it was three screens down in the inbox.
Lotic is software for freight forwarders that starts at the enquiry and stops at the invoice. It is deliberately narrow: it does the part that is done by hand today.
Three pieces, one workspace.
Each of these is a page in its own right, because forwarders arrive looking for one of them specifically.
Lead management
Connect the inbox you already use. Every enquiry is classified on arrival, the shipment facts are pulled out of the email body, and each lead sits on a board that shows whose court the ball is in.
Freight forwarding lead management → 02 · RatesRate card software
Drop in the rate sheets your suppliers send. Lotic parses them into a live rate card, flags the lines it is not sure about, and you resolve those alerts in plain English rather than in a formula bar.
Freight rate card software → 03 · ClientsClient management
Every enquiry, quotation, rate and invoice for a customer sits under that customer — so the question "what did we quote them last time?" has an answer that takes a second, not an afternoon.
Freight client management →What happens to one enquiry.
The email arrives
It lands in the inbox you already give customers. Nothing changes for them — no portal to sign into, no form to fill in.
It is classified and read
Lotic works out that it is a quoting enquiry rather than a booking or an invoice query, then pulls the shipment out of the body: lane, mode, container count or volume, and what is missing.
It is priced from your rate cards
Not from a public index. Lotic picks the cost components the shipment needs across six modules — origin charges, ocean freight, destination charges and the rest — from the rates you loaded.
Your margin goes on
The margin rules are yours. The quotation is assembled and ready to send within seconds of pricing.
It is sent, and tracked
The lead moves across the board as the customer replies, so you can see at a glance what is still waiting on you and what is waiting on them.
Accepted becomes invoiced
The accepted quotation carries through to an invoice, so the numbers you quoted are the numbers you bill. Nothing is re-keyed between the two.
Who this is for — and who it isn't.
Small and mid-sized ocean freight forwarders, customs brokers and NVOCCs quoting FCL and LCL, with a quoting desk of one to ten people, who build quotes by hand today and hold their rates in spreadsheets and email attachments.
Anyone who needs a full TMS: booking, customs filing, container tracking, warehouse management. Lotic does none of those. Enterprise forwarders with an existing rating engine and a team maintaining it are also not who this is built for.
Frequently asked questions.
What does freight forwarding software actually need to do?
For a small forwarder, the work that eats the day is quoting: reading an enquiry, finding the right rates, assembling the cost lines, applying margin and sending it back before the customer asks someone else. Lotic is built around that loop rather than around shipment tracking or a general sales pipeline.
Is Lotic a TMS or a forwarding operations system?
No. It does not book space, file customs declarations or track containers. It covers the front of the job — enquiry, rate card, quotation, invoice — and is meant to sit alongside whatever you use operationally rather than replace it.
How small is too small for software like this?
Lotic is designed around a quoting desk of one to ten people. If one person quotes a handful of shipments a week from a spreadsheet they know by heart, the gain is smaller. The forwarders it helps most are the ones where quoting is spread over several people and several spreadsheets.
Do I have to move my rates into a new format?
No. You drop in the rate sheets your carriers and agents already send you — PDFs and spreadsheets in whatever layout they use — and Lotic parses them into a rate card. Where it is not confident about a line it raises an alert instead of guessing.
Is Lotic available to buy today?
Not yet. Lotic is in private beta and places are released in small batches. Join the waitlist and we will be in touch when one opens, or email admin@lotic.sh if you would rather talk first.
Be the first to quote.
Private beta. Places open in small batches.