Lade
AI-assisted pricing, CPQ, and CRM for freight forwarders
An operations platform for freight forwarders and NVOCCs — buy/sell rate management, an all-in CPQ quoting engine across ocean and air, AI that drafts a priced quote from a customer email, cognitive selling-rate recommendations, customer risk scoring, shipment and invoice tracking, and contract governance with a full audit trail.
Freight forwarders price in spreadsheets — buy and sell rates drift apart, surcharges get missed, FX moves between quote and invoice, and margin is estimated instead of computed. Meanwhile quoting an email is manual, at-risk accounts go unnoticed until the volume is gone, and receivables age in a different system entirely.
Freight forwarders and NVOCCs running ocean and air — pricing desks, sales teams, and finance and credit-control teams that quote, contract, invoice, and manage accounts at volume.
The full picture
Forwarders quote out of spreadsheets: buy rates in one tab, sell rates in another, surcharges bolted on by hand, and margin guessed rather than computed. Lade replaces that with a single operations platform. A pure, deterministic CPQ engine prices ocean FCL per container, ocean LCL on weight-or-measure, and air on chargeable weight — separating every charge into its own line, applying percentage surcharges and minimum-charge floors, locking the FX rate so a quote is reproducible, and pairing buy and sell on each line so margin is the exact difference, never an estimate. Claude sits beside the engine, not inside it: paste a customer enquiry and it extracts the lane, equipment, and measures and drafts a quote through the same engine; ask for a selling rate and it recommends one from the account's own volume, trend, share-of-wallet, risk level, and market benchmarks — explaining the call in prose that only paraphrases real numbers, never inventing them. Around that runs everything a forwarding desk lives in: accounts with credit limits and a sales pipeline; a customer risk radar that grades every account red/amber/green off the real shipment ledger and surfaces recoverable TEU; a shipment ledger with booking-to-delivery milestones; invoicing with AR aging and DSO; rate cards with validity windows; reports and a live executive dashboard; and contracts under governance — every money figure stored as exact decimal and every change written to an append-only audit log.
From input to audit trail.
Price
Build buy and sell rate cards per lane, mode, and validity window — or let cognitive pricing recommend the selling rate.
Quote
Enter shipment measures, or paste a customer email and Claude drafts the quote; the engine assembles it charge by charge.
Margin
Buy and sell pair per line; margin and converted totals are computed exactly at a locked FX rate.
Run
Track shipments and invoices, watch at-risk accounts on the dashboard, and close contracts — every change written to the audit log.
What it does.
All-In CPQ Engine
A pure, deterministic quoting engine that separates every charge into its own line — percentage surcharges and minimum-charge floors included.
AI Quote from Email
Paste a customer enquiry and Claude extracts the lane, equipment, and measures, then drafts a priced quote through the same engine.
Cognitive Pricing
Recommends a selling rate from the account's volume, trend, share-of-wallet, risk, and market benchmarks — with a margin floor it won't cross.
Exact Margin & FX
Buy and sell pair on every charge so margin is the exact difference, with the FX rate locked at issue for reproducibility.
Multi-Modal Pricing
Ocean FCL per container, LCL on weight-or-measure, and air on chargeable weight — the right basis for every mode.
Buy/Sell Rate Cards
Manage buy and sell rates side by side, per lane and mode, with validity windows and active versioning.
Customer Risk Radar
Grades every account red/amber/green off the real shipment ledger — flagging declining volume, share-of-wallet gaps, and recoverable TEU.
Shipments & Invoicing
A shipment ledger with booking-to-delivery milestones, plus invoicing with payments, 5-bucket AR aging, and DSO.
Contracts & Audit
Accounts, credit, and contract governance with an append-only audit trail; all money stored as exact decimal, never floating point.
Carrier Rate-Sheet Capture
Drop a carrier's rate sheet or email and Claude extracts the lines into a draft buy rate card for a human to approve.
Document Auto-Tracking
Booking confirmations, arrival notices, and B/Ls are read and mapped onto each shipment's milestone timeline automatically.
Smart Collections
Drafts the right dunning email for every aging bucket and customer — the amounts come straight from the AR ledger.
Account Pre-Call Brief
Synthesizes the customer 360 — volume, trend, share-of-wallet, open claims, AR — into a one-screen talking-points brief.
Risk Narratives
Explains why an account turned red or amber and suggests the next action, paraphrasing real numbers from the ledger.
Contract Intelligence
Extracts key terms from an uploaded contract and flags mismatches against your active rate cards.
See Lade in action
Built for freight forwarders and nvoccs running ocean and air — pricing desks. Try it on the live site, or book a walkthrough with our team.