Your loads arrive as PDFs from six forwarders in four languages.
A carrier working for forwarders does not have a customer portal. It has an inbox. Every load starts as an email, usually with an attachment, usually in a language and a template that changes with the sender, and somebody in your office turns that into a row before any truck moves.
The retyping is the cost.
It is not glamorous and it is not small. Forty emails a day, a third with a PDF, each one read, judged and transcribed. It is where the reference numbers get transposed, where a time window gets rounded, and where a load gets quoted twice because two dispatchers were both in their own inbox.
- One shared pool instead of four private inboxes
- Order requests separated from the rest of the mail
- Details read from the body or the attached PDF, including scans of paper orders
- Polish, Romanian, French, German, Italian and English, including mixed-language templates
Six senders, four languages, one list.
“Orders arrive by email” is unremarkable. Orders arriving by email in Polish, German, Italian and Romanian, from six templates that each change without warning, is the actual job somebody in your office is doing every morning.
Then the forwarder wants to know where it is.
A forwarder has their own client asking them the same question you are being asked. Give them the answer directly and the call does not reach you. Each order carries a tracking link with the truck, the current stop and a live estimate, and the plate can be hidden when a forwarder would rather their client did not see whose truck it is.
And then it has to be invoiced correctly.
Subcontracting is cross-border by nature: a Romanian carrier, a German forwarder, a load that starts in Belgium. The invoice applies the domestic rate or the intra-EU reverse charge from the two countries involved, with the fuel and toll costs of the run already attached, so you know the margin on a forwarder before you decide whether to keep working for them.
- Domestic VAT or 0% reverse charge decided from the invoice, not from memory
- Costs attached to the order before invoicing, so the margin is visible per load
- Ageing report by customer, which is the honest way to rank forwarders
- Invoice with the CMR attached, emailed from your own address
Questions people actually ask.
- Do we have to change how forwarders send us loads?
- No. They keep emailing exactly as they do now. The change is entirely on your side of the mailbox.
- What if the PDF is a scan or a photo of a paper order?
- It is read visually, the way you would read a photograph of a document, rather than requiring a text layer.
- Can two dispatchers end up working the same email?
- No. An email is taken by one person and visibly claimed in the shared pool.
- Can we hide our plates from the forwarder's client?
- Yes, plate anonymisation is a per-company setting on the shared tracking page.
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Send us one of yesterday's order emails.
Whatever language it is in. We will show you what comes out of it on a 30 minute call.