Your driver pulls into the shipper at 6:50 for a 7:00 appointment. The guard asks for the pickup number and tells him check-in is at the other gate, around the back, and he was supposed to call an hour ago.

All of that was on the rate con. Page three, small print, under a heading nobody reads.

Nobody did anything wrong. The load got entered, the rate was right, the dates were right. The one part that mattered at 6:50 in the morning just never made it off the PDF.

That's what this update is about.

Every Broker Has Their Own Idea of a Rate Con

If you've booked loads for more than a week, you already know this. One broker sends a clean one-pager. Another sends four pages where the first two are terms and conditions. One puts the pickup in a neat table, another writes it out as a paragraph, and a third lists their own office address in big bold letters right at the top, where it looks exactly like a shipper.

Reading the rate and the dates was never really the problem. Those are easy to find. The hard parts were always the same three things:

  • Layouts we hadn't seen before. A new broker meant a new format, and a new format meant more fields left for your dispatcher to fill in.
  • Addresses. The facility name, the street, the suite or dock number, and the city all have to land in the right place. When they don't, the stop is wrong and the miles are wrong.
  • Driver instructions. Appointment rules, check-in steps, lumper notes, "call before arrival". The stuff that ruins a morning when it gets missed.

So that's where we spent our time.

What's Different Now

Most PDF rate cons now get read

Whatever the layout, most rate confirmations that come in as a PDF now get read properly. Clean one-pagers, four-page ones buried in terms and conditions, tables, paragraphs. The reader works out which part of the document is the pickup, which is the delivery, and which is just the broker talking about themselves.

Addresses come through the way they should

This was the part we were least happy with before, so it got the most attention. Every now and then a stop would come through with a city and a zip but no street. Or it would have the street but not the name of the facility, so the driver knew where to go but not what they were looking for when they got there. Now the full address, street and facility name included, comes through a lot more often.

Getting the address right sounds like a small thing. It isn't. It's what the miles, the ETA, and the driver's navigation are all built on, so one bad address on a load quietly throws off everything downstream.

Driver instructions come over with the load

The reader now picks up the instructions meant for the driver and brings them into the load, instead of leaving them sitting in the PDF. Appointment details, check-in notes, reference and pickup numbers, special handling: if the broker wrote it down for the driver, it shows up where your team can actually see it.

And it doesn't stop at the office. The same instructions show up for the driver in the Beyond Transport mobile app, right on the load they're running. Nobody has to forward the PDF or read the notes out over the phone.

Which brings us back to that driver at the wrong gate. That one's preventable now.

What Didn't Change

You still get the last word. The reader fills the load in, your dispatcher looks it over, and nothing gets created until someone confirms it. We think that's the right way to do it. The AI does the typing, and a person who knows the lane signs off.

The workflow is also the same as before: drop the PDF in, review, confirm. If you're already using it, you don't have to change anything. The next rate con you upload will just come through more complete.

The rate confirmation reader is part of the Advanced plan. You can see how it fits into the rest of the dispatch workflow on our dispatch automation page.

A Note From Us

When we ask customers what they like most about Beyond Transport, the rate con reader comes up more often than almost anything else. One of them told us it "saves the dispatch team significant time," which is about the nicest thing you can say about software. That's exactly why we kept working on it. A feature people rely on every day should keep getting better, not just sit there.

If you run into a rate con it still doesn't read well, send it our way. Those are the ones that make it better.