Freight Forwarding Software Development Services

Quote and rate management for ocean, air and road, booking with carriers and airlines, the shipment or job file that follows a consignment from origin to delivery, LCL and air consolidation with house and master documents, document generation (house bills of lading, house air waybills, arrival notices, commercial invoice and packing list checks), customs filing workflows, job costing and profit per shipment, agent-network billing, and customer portals for quotes, bookings, tracking and documents.

Usually you shouldn't replace it. The core forwarding system handles accounting, compliance and the operational record well. Custom work pays off around it: a quoting engine that prices the way your sales team actually sells, a branded customer portal your clients use instead of emailing for status, automation that turns shipping instructions and PDFs into structured bookings, or analytics across branches and agents. Where the platform exposes APIs or EDI, we integrate with it rather than duplicate it; where it doesn't, we say so before scoping.

Carrier contract rates, NAC and spot rates, surcharges (BAF, PSS, THC, security and fuel), local charges and your margin rules are stored as structured, versioned data rather than spreadsheets. A quote combines origin, freight and destination legs, applies validity dates and Incoterms responsibility, and can pull live spot prices from rate platforms or carrier APIs where you have access. Accepted quotes become bookings without re-keying, so the job's actual costs can be compared with what was sold.

Ocean carrier booking, schedules and track-and-trace through DCSA-standard APIs where carriers publish them, or through INTTRA (e2open) and carrier portals where they don't; airline bookings, e-AWB and status through Cargo-IMP/Cargo-XML messages and, increasingly, IATA ONE Record; container tracking providers; customs filing through ACE (for US ISF and entries via a broker or ABI provider), the EU ICS2 entry summary declarations and national systems such as the UK CDS; accounting systems; and EDI X12 or EDIFACT (IFTMIN, IFTSTA) with shippers and partners. We confirm access, message versions and costs for each partner in discovery.

Yes, and it's the part most generic tools get wrong. The data model keeps house shipments (HBL, HAWB) separate from master documents (MBL, MAWB), supports co-loading with other forwarders, splits costs across houses by weight, volume or chargeable weight, and produces the house-level data that regimes such as ICS2 and US ISF require from the party that holds it.

We start with discovery on your real jobs: modes, trade lanes, branches, agents, current systems and where staff re-key data. That gives a written scope, an integration map and a first release, usually one workflow such as quoting or the customer portal. We design screens with your operators and sales team, build against carrier and customs test environments, then run the new workflow on live jobs before widening it.

You do. Source code, cloud accounts, rate data, customer data and integration credentials belong to your company, and Northell Design documents every integration so your team or another vendor can take it over.