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What is Quoting & Rate Management?

You're absolutely right. Let me restructure this with proper subcategory organization. Here's the logical breakdown:

Quoting & Rate Management

Subcategories:

1. Rate Table Setup & Management

Building and maintaining your pricing foundation

Articles under this subcategory:

  • Customer Rate Tables
  • Carrier Tariff Management
  • Fuel Surcharge Management
  • Accessorial Charge Management
  • Zone-Based Rating

2. Quoting & Pricing Tools

Using rates to quote and price freight

Articles under this subcategory:

  • Automated Rating Engine
  • Manual Quote Creation
  • Quote-to-Order Conversion
  • Lane History & Market Rates
  • Multi-Currency Quoting

Now let me create the Category Overview and the two Subcategory Overview articles, then we can develop the individual detailed feature articles:

Quoting & Rate Management - Category Overview

What is Quoting & Rate Management?

Quoting & Rate Management is how you price freight for customers and manage costs with carriers in TMS.ai. This is where customer rate tables, carrier tariffs, fuel surcharges, accessorial charges, and lane-specific pricing all live so your team can quote accurately, price competitively, and maintain profitable margins. Instead of juggling Excel spreadsheets or manually calculating rates for every quote, you build rate structures once and the system applies them automatically across quotes, orders, and invoices.

This module ensures pricing consistency across your operation. When a sales rep quotes a lane, they're pulling from the same rate tables that dispatch uses when building orders and that accounting references when generating invoices. Everyone works from the same numbers, margin calculations happen automatically, and you can see immediately if a load is profitable before committing to cover it.

The module splits into two main areas: the foundational setup where you build and maintain your rate tables, and the operational tools where you use those rates to quote customers and book profitable freight.

Why use Quoting & Rate Management?

Eliminate manual rate lookups and calculations. Your team stops hunting through spreadsheets to find what you charged a customer last time or what a carrier quoted six months ago. Rates live in the system, searchable by lane, customer, equipment type, or any other criteria you define.

Maintain consistent pricing across sales and operations. When customer rates are stored in TMS.ai, every quote for that customer on that lane uses the agreed pricing. You don't have reps accidentally underquoting or dispatch booking loads at rates that don't match what sales promised.

Calculate margins automatically on every load. The system shows customer rate minus carrier cost on each order, letting you see profitability before accepting freight. You identify money-losing lanes immediately instead of discovering margin problems when accounting runs monthly reports.

Speed up quoting and booking processes. Sales reps generate quotes in seconds by selecting a customer and lane, with rates pre-populating from your tariffs. Dispatch books orders knowing exactly what the customer pays and what the carrier costs, with margin calculations handled automatically.

Track historical pricing for better negotiation. Lane history shows what you've quoted and moved on specific routes over time. When contract renewal comes up, you negotiate from data about actual volumes, rates, and margins rather than gut feel or incomplete records.

Support complex pricing structures. The rating engine handles flat rates, mileage-based pricing, weight breaks, fuel surcharges, accessorials, and zone-based rating. You model your actual pricing complexity instead of forcing everything into simple per-mile rates.

Subcategories:

Rate Table Setup & Management covers building your pricing foundation. This is where you configure customer rate tables, carrier tariffs, fuel surcharge calculations, and accessorial charges. These are the building blocks that power automated rating throughout the rest of the system.

Quoting & Pricing Tools covers using those configured rates operationally. This is where sales creates customer quotes, where the rating engine automatically applies rates to orders, where you compare your pricing against market rates, and where you handle multi-currency quoting for cross-border freight.

What it means for you:

Your pricing becomes data-driven instead of guesswork. Sales quotes accurately because they're pulling from established customer rates. Dispatch knows if a load is profitable before tendering it to a carrier. Accounting invoices correctly because the rates that flowed through quoting and dispatch are the same ones appearing on the invoice. When everyone works from the same rate data, pricing errors drop, margin improves, and your operation runs more professionally.

This structured approach also scales with your business. When you're moving 100 loads monthly, you might remember what each customer pays. At 1,000 loads monthly, that memory-based pricing breaks down. Rate tables and automated rating let you grow without losing pricing consistency or forcing every rate decision through one person who "knows the numbers."