Short answer
Real freight paperwork doesn’t come in one format. In a sample of 14 documents from one brokerage’s inbox, we found three unrelated kinds of document, 5 with no price on them, one load issued twice at two different rates, weights in kilograms, and one PDF whose text a machine couldn’t read at all. Load entry has to handle all of it, whether a person or software is doing the typing.
Before we built load entry for FreightVero, we asked Bronco Logistics for a stack of the documents that create loads on their desk. They sent 14 files. We expected 14 rate confirmations.
What we got was 13 documents covering 11 shipments, in three formats, with a price on 8 of them. The fourteenth wasn’t a load at all. This post lists the 12 things in that folder that would have produced a wrong load, and what to do about each one.
What was in the folder
| Kind of document | Files | Price on the page? | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rate confirmation from another broker | 8 | Yes | Tenders a load, with stops, times, freight and the rate |
| Air-freight delivery order | 5 | No | Releases freight for pickup from an airline’s ground handler |
| Bill of lading | 1 | No | Belongs on a load that already exists. It doesn’t create one |
The rate confirmations came from four senders in four layouts. The delivery orders are a different job altogether. Each one gives you a pickup at a handler’s warehouse, a consignee, an airway bill number, a piece count and a weight. None of the five had a price, an appointment time or an equipment type. A dispatcher supplies all three.
The 12 traps at a glance
| # | What was on the page | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A delivery order with no rate | The load is booked with a guessed rate, or a blank one nobody goes back to |
| 2 | The same load sent twice, at two rates | Booked twice, or booked at the rate that was replaced |
| 3 | The same PDF under two file names | Booked twice |
| 4 | A fixed time written as a window, 08:00 to 08:00 | Saved as a window zero minutes long, or rejected with an error nobody can act on |
| 5 | Stops in different time zones on one load | One zone applied to every stop, so an appointment is off by an hour |
| 6 | The shipper’s name in the biggest type, a forwarder as the bill-to | The load goes under the wrong customer |
| 7 | A PDF whose text layer is garbage | Text-based tools read nonsense and don’t say so |
| 8 | Weight in kilograms | A 2,075 kg shipment booked as 2,075 lb |
| 9 | Hazmat described in words, with no checkbox | Hazmat freight booked as general freight |
| 10 | Three pickups and one delivery on one confirmation | Stops dropped by a tool that expects one of each |
| 11 | An airway bill number in the pickup-number field | Filed as a PO number, where nobody looks for it at the airline dock |
| 12 | Equipment listed only as Straight Truck | The system picks a size, and the wrong truck gets sent |
The expensive one: same load, two rates, 33 minutes apart
One load arrived twice. Same stops, same freight, same pickup numbers, issued 33 minutes apart. The second confirmation was for half the rate of the first. Both had been accepted.
That’s a rate revision, and it’s the most expensive thing in the folder. Book the first and treat the second as a duplicate, and the board carries twice the agreed revenue. Margin looks better than it is, so nothing looks wrong until the customer pays the lower number.
The fix is to compare terms when a reference number already exists, and not to refuse outright. If the rate, the stop count or the delivery city doesn’t match, a person decides which document stands. An identical re-send can be ignored quietly.
The folder also had the plain version of this trap: one PDF saved under two file names. Fingerprinting the file’s contents catches that. The file name tells you nothing.
A missing rate isn’t a failed read
Five of the 13 load documents had no price anywhere on the page. For anyone keying loads, that’s a different answer from “I couldn’t read it.”
A field the reader wasn’t sure about sends you back to the PDF for a second look. A field the document never contained sends you somewhere else: the customer, the rate sheet, the salesperson. Mix the two up and people waste time rereading a page that was never going to answer the question.
Times that aren’t what they look like
Two senders wrote a firm appointment as a window that starts and ends at the same minute. One printed the pickup as 08:00 to 08:00. Read literally, that’s a window zero minutes long. It’s an appointment, and it should be saved as one.
Time zones were the other problem. One load picked up twice in Eastern time and delivered in Central. One sender printed the zone next to every time. Another printed CST. A third printed no zone and meant Central.
The rule we settled on: read the zone on the document when there is one, work it out from the stop’s address when there isn’t, and never apply one zone to a whole load.
Units and hazmat hide in the text
Air freight is weighed in kilograms. Two of the five delivery orders gave the weight in kilograms only. Two more printed kilograms first and pounds second. A TMS that stores pounds and takes the number as written understates the load by a factor of 2.2. That’s enough to send the wrong truck.
Hazmat was the same kind of problem. No document had a hazmat checkbox. One delivery order said corrosive liquid in the description field. The bill of lading carried a 24-hour emergency number and a note that placards were tendered. A person reading that knows what it means. Software has to flag it from the wording, then make the reviewer confirm it.
Who’s the customer, and is this even a load?
On one delivery order, the same company was named as shipper and consignee in the largest type on the page. It wasn’t the customer. A forwarder had issued the document, and the forwarder is who hired the truck. Other orders settled it with a Bill To box. Match the customer on who issued the paperwork, and let Bill To win when it’s there.
The rate confirmations had their own version. Each one had a box labeled Carrier with the brokerage’s own name in it, because on those loads the brokerage was covering freight for another broker. Read that box as the carrier to assign and you’ve booked the load to yourself. The rate on that page is revenue, not carrier pay.
Then there was the bill of lading. It named a shipper, a consignee, a commodity and a weight, and it tendered nothing. Drop it on a system that only knows how to create loads and you get a phantom load. Load entry has to be able to say this isn’t a load, and offer to attach it to one.
Why we send the PDF and not the text
One rate confirmation looked normal on screen. Pull the text out of it and every character came back wrong, because the file used a custom font with no map back to real letters. A process that extracts text first would have produced nonsense for that customer on every load, with no error.
So FreightVero’s load entry sends the document itself to the model, the way a person looks at the page. It never works from a text dump.
What FreightVero’s load entry does with all this
- It sorts the document first: rate confirmation, air-freight delivery order, or supporting paperwork that attaches to an existing load.
- Every field comes back with the text it was read from, so your team checks a snippet instead of retyping the page.
- A field the document doesn’t contain is marked not on this document.
- A re-sent file is caught by its fingerprint. A revision is flagged against the load already on file.
- Each stop gets its own time zone, and kilograms are converted to pounds. A weight with no unit is refused.
- Nothing is created until a person confirms the draft.
We don’t publish accuracy numbers yet. One brokerage’s paperwork isn’t enough volume to make a percentage mean anything. The details are on the load entry agent page.
Use the list on your own desk
You don’t need software to use this list. Pull last week’s inbound paperwork and count how many of the 12 show up. Then ask whoever keys your loads, or whatever tool reads them, what happens on each one.
Our rate confirmation checklist covers the fields to check before dispatch, and the glossary has a plain-language entry on the rate confirmation itself.
Try it on your own paperwork
Send us a handful of the rate cons and delivery orders that land on your desk. We’ll show you the draft each one produces, and where it asks a person to decide.
