Freight forwarding software features — the complete Linbis reference

Quoting & sales

The quote is a live document, priced off your own contracts, sent into the customer's thread — and convertible into the operating file without re-typing.

• A live, editable printed quotation inside the mail rail — the actual document, not a form that renders one later, sharing one state and one save path with the compact card.
• Auto-pricing against your own contract rate cards before anything is saved; an unpriced line says "no rate — enter" with the reason, never a misleading $0.
• A pre-send completeness check that names the blockers, and a send that waits for in-flight price autosaves — a stale price cannot be emailed.
• Quotes go out as threaded replies on Gmail, Microsoft 365, or IMAP — the customer sees "Re:", not an orphan message.
• A public, no-login accept/decline page with your cost, margin, and rep stripped from the payload itself.
• Nine print formats, including two Spanish variants and a split buy/sell layout.
• Per-line cargo detail — HS codes, unit values, dimensions, kg↔lb and m³↔ft³ conversion, volumetric weight.
• One-click conversion to a shipping order, shipment, or warehouse receipt, carrying parties, charges, commodities, and the rep who won it.
• Counter-offer handling — accept their number, propose different, or decline; repricing is atomic with the conversion, and the outcome is stored on the quote.
• Self-expiring quotes with a 3/7/14-day chase and AI-drafted follow-ups that never send without a human; restricted commodities park on a DG hold.

Deep page: freight quote software

Consolidation — master & house

The forwarder's core object: many customers' cargo riding one master, kept in sync by construction rather than by memory.

• Build a master and hang houses under it — MAWB/HAWB for air, MBL/HBL for ocean — with the hierarchy visible on the file.
• Bulk conversion built for volume — hundreds of shipping orders become house shipments in one action, engineered in batches rather than a loop with a progress bar.
• 24 named fields propagate master→house automatically, and status cascades with them.
• House cargo re-aggregates onto the master, and a discrepancy check compares the master's declared pieces, weight, and volume against the live sum of its houses — before the carrier finds the mismatch.
• Back-to-back files and master-from-houses created in one step.
• One carrier update on the master bill writes onto every house underneath it — events, statuses, and alerts, in a single transaction.
• Profit per house and per container, not just per consolidation.

Background reading: MAWB vs HAWB explained

Accounting & QuickBooks

A real double-entry ledger built for forwarding — not an export to your accountant — with the charge line carrying both sides of the money.

• Double-entry general ledger with a 91-account freight chart of accounts seeded for you on day one — including agent receivable/payable and commission accounts — with accounting periods that close and lock.
• Income and expense on one charge line, in different currencies — bill the customer in USD while costing the carrier in EUR, with per-line profit computed, not reconstructed.
• Accounts receivable end to end — invoice from charges, post, age, credit-memo, collect, void.
• Accounts payable end to end — vendor bills, approval, posting, vendor aging, payment runs.
• Month-end correctness built in — revenue recognized on delivery (ASC 606) with deferral release, and cost accruals with match-to-bill and auto-reversal.
• Bank feeds and reconciliation with rules and auto-match.
• QuickBooks Online two-way sync across 16 entity types — invoices, bills, payments, credit memos, journal entries, tax codes, multicurrency, divisions mapped to QuickBooks departments, and dedicated handling for the overseas agent who is customer and vendor at once.
• Choose where the books live — Linbis GL, QuickBooks only, or both in parallel; it is a setting, not a project.
• Hosted payment pages and payment links (Stripe) with escalating reminders and automatic cash application.
• AI vendor-bill intake — a carrier invoice email is extracted, correlated to the shipment, compared line by line against expected cost, and lands as a draft payable with a variance alert.
• The charge lock is enforced by the database — once a line is invoiced or billed it refuses edits until the document is voided; cost and margin are masked from roles that shouldn't see them, in the API and on printed forms.
• The overseas-agent problem, handled — route any single charge to an agent bill-to, keep an agent master file with commission rates, tiers, and credit limits, and produce a per-shipment statement netting what they owe you against what you owe them.

Deep page: freight accounting

Email & the AI Freight Desk

Any mailbox, read by AI into 24 freight-specific document types, with a human Approve between the email and your operating data.

• Connect any mailbox — Gmail, Microsoft 365 (including shared mailboxes like ops@ and bookings@), or generic IMAP/SMTP — with per-mailbox access control: private, named members, or whole company.
• Push delivery with a no-loss ledger — every message the provider reports gets a durable accounting row before it is fetched; nothing is silently dropped.
• 24 freight-specific classifications — arrival notice, pre-alert, customs hold, booking confirmation, vendor bill and more — with per-type confidence thresholds calibrated to blast radius (a vendor bill needs 0.98; an inquiry 0.70).
• Field extraction from the email body and its PDF/image attachments — container numbers, MBL/HAWB, vessel, ETA, free time, charges, parties — with per-field evidence links.
• Approve-to-create — approving a booking email creates the shipment and fires its workflow; a quote request becomes a quote; a carrier invoice becomes a draft payable.
• A real composer — reply, reply-all, forward with attachments, cc/bcc, a chosen From mailbox, snippets, signatures, autosaved drafts — plus document sends straight off a record (eight entity types) with the right PDF pre-attached and links re-derived server-side at send.
• A rules engine with a dry-run tester that shares the production evaluator — what the tester predicts is exactly what production does.
• Shared-inbox triage — assign, snooze, mark done, tag, individually or in bulk; an open-items checklist per email with thread OPEN/WAITING/RESOLVED states.
• Internal comments with person and role @mentions, live presence, and typing indicators — discuss the email without the customer seeing.
• Company-wide email templates with validated merge tokens, and a do-not-send list enforced at the send call.
• Truthful outbound — bounce handling parses real RFC 3464 delivery reports, sends are exactly-once with an execution ledger, and a failed send says so instead of toasting success.

Deep page: logistics AI

Documents & Forms

Ninety-seven finished layouts out, OCR and AI extraction in — and a real template designer in the browser when the standard layout is not yours.

• 97 finished document templates — bills of lading, air waybills, manifests, delivery and pickup orders, PODs, certificates of origin, phytosanitary and fumigation certificates, customs declarations, packing lists, warehouse receipts and releases, and nine quotation layouts.
• Every commercial flavour of bill of lading — Switch B/L, Express/Telex Release, To-Order negotiable, Straight, Short Form, Charter Party, Combined Transport — among 175 configuration-driven variants, with the MAWB alone as an IATA three-copy set, single digital layout, or thermal-printer compact.
• Your letterhead and brand colour on every document, contrast-checked so a pale brand never prints white on white.
• Forms Studio: a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG template designer in the browser — millimetre-accurate multi-page geometry, repeatable tables, conditional visibility, no developer.
• 343 freight data fields bindable into any template by picking from a list — shipper, consignee, container, VGM, charges by currency, customs numbers.
• Documents generate themselves at the right milestone — booking confirmed produces the booking confirmation, HBL, and manifest without anyone remembering to.
• Masked fields are pruned from the PDF, not hidden — a buy rate a role cannot see is absent from the document's text layer, so it cannot be selected, copied, or text-extracted.
• Inbound paperwork is read, not filed — OCR plus AI extraction turns an incoming AWB, B/L, invoice, packing list, customs declaration, or POD into structured data.
• Reproducible, air-gapped rendering — the document tier needs zero outbound network, with assets inlined and a frozen render clock for byte-identical PDFs.

Deep page: documentation & guides

Rate intelligence

Your carrier's tariff, read by AI into structured rate cards that price your quotes — and an engine that refuses rather than guesses.

• Drop the carrier's rate sheet in — Excel, CSV, PDF, even scanned pages read by a vision model — and get structured buy/sell lines back.
• Confidence triage you can dial — high-confidence sheets promote themselves into live rate cards; doubtful ones queue for a human; thresholds and the kill switch are yours.
• ~40 tariff phrasings normalised to one basis, with unknown charge names fuzzy-matched to your own charge codes and an explicit ambiguity band that asks instead of guessing.
• Weight-or-measure groups priced correctly — MAX of revenue tons against CBM across the group, with the group minimum applied.
• Weight-break ladders where the tightest applicable break wins, with a deterministic tie-break.
• Customer-scoped contract pricing, fail-closed — a card scoped to one customer is invisible to every other customer and to anonymous lookups.
• Four-eyes approval on every rate change (approver ≠ creator, enforced in the database) with supersession that never strands a customer's contract rate.
• Governance on AI-created rates — database-level immutability, a verification SLA, an auto-flip back to pending, a per-tenant hard cap, and a nightly shape validator — plus a 30-day renewal queue, and expired cards can never price.
• Exact-or-refuse pricing — a basis the engine does not fully understand or a stale FX rate returns a named refusal, not an invented number.
• Ask carriers for rates from inside the quote — one sanitized RFQ email per carrier, human-approved before sending, with the reply parsed back onto the quote.

Rates price the quote directly — see freight quote software.

Duties, customs & landed cost

Duty layered the way customs actually stacks it, and compliance paperwork kept as validated records — prepared and scored in Linbis, filed through your broker.

• Layered US duty estimation — base MFN plus Section 301, Section 232, an anti-dumping applicability flag, MPF and HMF — with destination VAT/IVA/GST on the correct CIF or FOB-plus-duty basis.
• Bi-temporal, source-attributed rates from USITC HTS, the Federal Register, and World Bank WITS — see what the rate was on the day you quoted.
• A coverage tier and confidence label on every estimate, with per-line operator overrides recorded with a reason; anti-dumping cases route to your broker rather than being guessed.
• Bill duty the way your business does — estimate now, at actuals, advisory only, or broker-separate; rolled up or split out — and post it to the file as real charges.
• ISF 10+2 records with the real importer elements — auto-populated from the shipment's parties and commodities, validated, and completeness-scored.
• EEI/AES export records — USPPI, EIN, Schedule B, ECCN, licence and exemption codes — with validation.
• Customs entry records with hold handling, feeding the same exception workflow as every other hold.
• Denied-party screening against four sanctions authorities — the US Consolidated Screening List, EU, UK OFSI, and UN — with every hit written to a seven-year audit log.
• 13 customs and 13 certificate document templates, from customs declarations to certificates of origin.

Background reading: duty calculator · ISF explained

Customization & platform

The screens, the workflow, the documents, and the permissions all bend to the tenant — without a consulting engagement.

• Redesign the screens themselves — rename any field, hide it, drag cards and tabs into a new order, add custom tabs, choose column layouts — across thirteen surfaces.
• Save layouts as named views — personal or published company-wide, with version history and one-click restore.
• Every tenant defines its own workflow stages, per record type — shipments split by transport mode × operation type into 24 independently configurable flows.
• A visual stage designer — drag to reorder, rename inline, live preview, and a live count of records on each stage.
• A per-stage automation wizard with seven action types — including emails with the right PDFs rendered and attached, personalised with merge fields, testable to yourself first.
• Per-stage send modes with three independent brakes — off, always-approve, or always-send, with a kill switch, recipient ceiling, and hourly budget; every refusal downgrades to a draft rather than being dropped.
• Stages advance themselves — on field completeness, document arrival, comparator conditions, or date math like "7 days before ETA" — per container where that matters, with exception routing to a hold stage and automatic return.
• Automations fire off database triggers, so an operator click, an AI write, a spreadsheet import, and a raw API call all trigger identically — and an idempotency ledger plus bulk suppression means a 500-record edit is never 500 emails.
• A shipment Journey view — where the file has been, what fired, what fires next and why it hasn't moved — computed from the same evaluator as the engine, so the forecast cannot drift.
• A drag-and-drop flowchart workflow builder with branching and server-side validation that names the fix when a workflow references a field the entity does not have — plus built-in freight playbooks: generated task checklists per shipment with dependencies and regulatory deadlines.
• Roles built from a 79-permission grid — record scoping like "only my accounts" re-derived on every query, and field masks that follow the document out the door.
• Enterprise hygiene — a tamper-evident audit trail that records delegation, an offboarding flow that previews everything a departing user holds and reassigns it, and tenant isolation enforced by the database itself.

How teams get set up: getting started with Linbis

Every capability on this page is a production feature of the current Linbis product, verified against the codebase inventory (286 production capabilities audited). Screens shown are the real product recorded on a demonstration company.