Road freight glossary

The ordinary European limits are 2.55 m width, 4 m height, 16.5 m length for an articulated combination and 40 tonnes gross combination weight. A shipment beyond any one of them leaves the standard regime and needs authorisation from each country and, in many cases, each region it crosses.

The price stops being a freight rate. It becomes a project cost covering the permit application, the route survey, the specialist trailer, escort vehicles, restricted travel times and, sometimes, temporary removal of street furniture. Lead times are measured in weeks, because the permits are.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and is not a permit or route-planning system: abnormal loads are handled as manual quotes. Because the customer portal accepts a quote request even where no rate grid covers the movement, an oversize enquiry still lands as a structured Q-YYYY-NNNN record instead of an untracked email.

Accessorials are where quoted prices and invoiced prices diverge. The base rate covers a standard pickup and a standard delivery; everything the driver does beyond that has a line in the tariff.

The common ones in European road freight are tail-lift delivery, appointment booking, waiting beyond the free period, delivery to a private address, failed delivery and redelivery, pallet exchange, and handling of ADR goods. Each has a trigger condition, and the trigger is usually discovered on site rather than declared at booking.

For a broker, the discipline is to quote them at the same time as the base rate. A quote that omits a 35 EUR tail lift on a 90 EUR shipment has not undercharged by 35 EUR — it has erased the margin twice over.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, prices options alongside the base rate: tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance, delivery appointment and custom options defined per grid.

Under the CMR Convention, a carrier's liability for loss or damage is limited to 8.33 special drawing rights per kilogram of gross weight, not the invoice value of the goods. A 200 kg pallet of electronics worth 40,000 EUR is therefore covered for a fraction of its value if the carrier's liability is all that applies.

Ad valorem cover closes that gap. The customer declares the value, the premium is a percentage of that value, and a claim is settled against the declared amount rather than the weight.

Two practical rules apply. The declaration has to be made before the goods move, and it has to appear on the consignment note. A value declared after a loss is not a declaration; it is a request.

In Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, ad valorem insurance is a priced option computed from the declared value, quoted alongside the base rate and stored on the quote and the shipment. Cargavo is not an insurer and does not place cover.

ADR stands for the Agreement concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road, concluded under the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva in 1957 and revised every two years. It is transposed into national law across the European contracting parties, so it governs domestic movements too.

For a broker, ADR changes three things at once: which carriers can accept the freight, what documentation must exist before the vehicle moves, and how the shipment is priced. Carriers either refuse ADR outright, accept it under limited-quantity rules, or accept it fully with a surcharge.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, and it treats ADR as a priced option on the quote — asked for on the form, priced from your grid, and recorded on the shipment. It does not classify goods, generate dangerous-goods declarations or check regulatory compliance; that responsibility stays with the shipper and the carrier.

APIs solve a real problem when a carrier has one. Rates come back from the carrier's own system, so they cannot drift out of date, and bookings are created without re-keying. The catch is coverage: the regional hauliers that make up most of a small broker's buy portfolio publish no API at all, and never will.

A rate grid is the answer that works for every carrier. It is slower to set up once and utterly reliable afterwards, and it prices carriers an API-first tool simply cannot see.

Cargavo has no carrier API and no EDI. It prices from the grids you rebuild, in four native models — weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket, hybrid_weight — with the fuel surcharge and options configured per carrier. If you need live carrier rate calls, Cargavo is not the right tool.

An empty return is pure cost: the same fuel, the same driver hours, the same tolls, with no revenue against them. A carrier will therefore accept a backhaul at a rate that covers marginal cost rather than full cost, and that discount is real money for the broker who finds it.

The catch is timing. A backhaul is only cheap while the vehicle is empty and near the loading point, which is a window of hours, not days. A shipment with a fixed collection date rarely qualifies; a flexible one often does.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and does not source capacity or post loads — it is not a freight exchange. What it does is let a spot buy rate be recorded per shipment and the sell price be derived from it with a margin expressed as p/(1-m) or as an absolute amount, so a cheap backhaul improves the margin instead of quietly disappearing into a fixed sell price.

The buy rate is the reference every other number depends on. It is not the base tariff cell alone: it is that cell after chargeable weight, bracket selection, paying-for, minimum charge, fuel surcharge and priced options have all been applied. A buy rate quoted without its surcharges is a number that will not match the carrier's invoice.

Because the buy rate is confidential in both directions — carriers negotiate different grids with different brokers, and customers must never see it — it belongs in a part of the system customers cannot read.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers built on that separation. Buy rates and margins live in a private record attached to each quote and each shipment; a customer signed into the portal sees the sell price and nothing else. The same engine that computes the buy rate computes the sell rate, so the two are always derived from the same tariff reading.

The rule exists to let vehicles fill their return legs instead of running empty, without letting foreign hauliers settle permanently in another national market. The seven-day window starts at the unloading of the incoming international consignment, and each cabotage operation must be evidenced by consignment notes showing the sequence.

Since the Mobility Package took effect in February 2022, a cooling-off period applies: after the cabotage operations, the same vehicle may not perform cabotage in the same member state for four days.

For a freight broker, cabotage is a compliance dimension of carrier selection, not a pricing model. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and stores carrier records, documents and quote history; it does not verify cabotage compliance, monitor vehicles or connect to enforcement systems. The obligation stays with the carrier and the contracting parties.

The carrier is the counterparty on the buy side. It signs the CMR consignment note as the party undertaking the carriage, carries liability under the CMR Convention for international movements, and publishes or negotiates the tariff that determines the broker's cost.

Carriers differ enormously in shape: a single-vehicle regional operator, a national groupage network with hubs, a specialist in temperature-controlled or ADR work. Each publishes its rates in its own format, which is why a broker's carrier portfolio ends up as a pile of incompatible spreadsheets.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and stores each carrier with its own rate grids, ratios, rounding rules, fuel surcharge and priced options, using four grid models — weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket and hybrid_weight. Cargavo has no carrier API and no EDI: rates come from grids you rebuild, not from a carrier system.

The checklist is short but non-negotiable. Transport licence, liability insurance certificate with its expiry date, VAT and company registration, bank details verified out of band, agreed payment terms, and a signed set of conditions. Everything after that is commercial.

The step that actually delays the first quote is the tariff. A new carrier arrives with an Excel file in its own layout, and until that file becomes structured data — zones, brackets, ratios, rounding, fuel surcharge, priced options — nobody can quote from it without reading the spreadsheet by hand.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and turns a carrier tariff into one of four grid models: weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket or hybrid_weight. Rebuild is self-service on every plan; assisted onboarding, where the Cargavo team loads the grids, is part of the Scale plan at 399 EUR per month.

A rate grid is what a negotiation produces once it is written down. It has three parts: a zone definition (which postcodes belong to zone A, B, C), a price matrix (zones across the top, size brackets down the side) and the rules around it — minimum charge, fuel surcharge basis, paying-for, priced options and the validity period.

Grids arrive as Excel or CSV attachments, one per carrier, each with its own layout. That is why quoting from grids by hand does not scale: five carriers on the same lane means five files and five lookups.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, models every tariff with one of four grid types: weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket and hybrid_weight. You rebuild your own grids from Excel or CSV — Cargavo ships no rates of its own and has no carrier API, so nothing in the system is a rate you did not negotiate.

A truck runs out of floor before it runs out of payload. That single fact is why no European groupage tariff bills on gross weight alone: 400 kg of insulation panels filling four pallet spaces costs the carrier the same capacity as 3,000 kg of tiles on the same footprint.

The tariff therefore states one or more floors, each converting volume or floor space into a kilogramme figure. The engine computes every applicable floor, takes the highest, and reads the rate grid at that weight. A 250 kg shipment measuring 3 m³ under a tariff stating 1 m³ = 250 kg is billed at 750 kg, not 250 kg.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers: chargeable weight is computed once, from the ratios you configure on each carrier grid, and the same figure feeds the buy rate and the sell rate. Because the two prices come from one engine, the weight that justifies your purchase invoice is the weight that justifies your customer's Q-YYYY-NNNN quote.

The note is evidence, not the contract itself. Article 4 of the CMR Convention is explicit: the absence, irregularity or loss of the consignment note does not affect the existence or validity of the contract. What the note does is create a presumption — of the conditions agreed and of the apparent condition of the goods when the carrier took them over.

It is made out in three original copies signed by the sender and the carrier. The first is handed to the sender, the second travels with the goods, and the third is kept by the carrier. That is why a delivery dispute always turns on which copy carries which handwritten remark.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers: it stores shipment documents, references and history against an S-YYYY-NNNN record, so the consignment note, the proof of delivery and the quote that priced the movement stay together. Cargavo does not issue a legally valid CMR note and is not an e-CMR platform.

It applies automatically whenever goods are carried by road for reward between two countries of which at least one is a contracting state, regardless of the nationality or residence of the parties. The parties cannot contract out of it: any clause derogating from the Convention is null and void.

Two provisions dominate practice. Article 17 makes the carrier liable for loss, damage and delay between taking over and delivery, subject to defined exonerations. Article 23 caps compensation at 8.33 Special Drawing Rights per kilogramme of gross weight short, which is why a declared value under Article 24 or a special interest under Article 26 exists at all.

Article 32 sets a limitation period of one year, extended to three years in cases of wilful misconduct. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and provides no legal advice or insurance: it keeps the quote, the shipment and its documents together so the facts of a claim are retrievable.

The consignee holds two powers that decide how a claim will go. It may refuse delivery, and it may accept the goods with reservations noted on the consignment note. A signature without reservation makes visible damage far harder to claim afterwards.

Under the CMR Convention, a reservation on visible damage must be made at delivery; for damage that is not apparent, the consignee has a limited number of days to notify the carrier in writing. Those windows are short, which is why a proof of delivery should be read, not just filed.

Consignee constraints also drive accessorial charges: a delivery appointment, a restricted time window, a site with no dock and therefore a tail lift. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and prices these as options on the quote rather than discovering them on the carrier invoice.

Contract rates are what fills a rate grid. They are negotiated on committed volume: the shipper or broker promises a flow, the carrier prices for the flow rather than for the shipment. In exchange, both sides accept that the market will move against one of them before the period ends.

A contract rate is rarely a single number. It is a tariff structure — zones, brackets, minimum charge — plus an indexation clause for fuel and, increasingly, a review clause tied to a published index. Without the indexation clause, the carrier prices the worst case into the base rate.

The practical risk for a broker is a contract rate that expires quietly. Quoting from an out-of-date grid produces sell prices that look normal and buy prices that no longer exist.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, holds validity dates on every grid so an expired tariff is visible before it silently prices a quote.

The dock is a sorting machine, not a warehouse. Inbound trunks arrive at night, goods are scanned, measured and moved across the dock to the outbound bay matching their delivery round, and the outbound vehicles leave in the morning. Dwell time is measured in hours, not days.

Two things get decided at the dock that a broker feels later. First, the shipment is re-measured, so a pallet quoted at 1.20 m high and arriving at 1.90 m generates a corrected invoice. Second, every extra handling is an opportunity for damage, which is why reservations on the CMR consignment note matter.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and does not operate docks or warehouses. What it does is keep the declared dimensions, weight and stackability attached to the Q-YYYY-NNNN quote and the S-YYYY-NNNN shipment, so a re-measurement can be checked against what was actually quoted.

The portal exists to remove the slowest step in brokerage: the round trip of an email asking for a price. A customer who can simulate a price at eleven at night does not wait for an answer in the morning, and a request submitted through a structured form arrives with all eight fields a quote needs.

Isolation is what makes it safe. A customer must never see another customer, never see a carrier rate grid, never see the buy rate and never see the margin. Any portal that leaks one of those has destroyed the broker's negotiating position.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and includes a customer portal with a price simulator, quote requests, booking, history and messaging, in English, French, Spanish or German. Where no rate grid covers a lane, the portal still accepts the request so the broker can price it manually.

Cut-offs exist because a groupage network is a timetable. The collection vehicle must return to the hub, the freight must be sorted, and the trunk must leave for the night run. A consignment arriving twenty minutes late does not travel twenty minutes later; it travels a day later.

Two different cut-offs usually apply and are often confused: the booking cut-off, the latest time to order a collection for that day, and the handover cut-off, the latest time to physically hand over at a terminal.

Missing a cut-off is the single most common cause of a broken delivery promise, and it is invisible on a rate grid. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and keeps service conditions with the carrier record so the commitment given to a customer matches what the carrier actually sells.

DAP is the natural rule for a seller-organised road movement. The seller bears cost and risk all the way to the named place; the buyer unloads. Naming the place precisely matters more than the rule itself — "DAP Lyon" is ambiguous, "DAP 14 rue X, 69007 Lyon" is not.

Two obligations often get missed. Unloading is the buyer's, so a delivery to a site with no dock needs a tail lift, and that is a priced option on the freight, not a free courtesy. Import clearance and duties are also the buyer's, which is what separates DAP from DDP.

Inside the EU customs union the import step disappears on intra-EU lanes, which makes DAP the default rule on most European road freight. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and prices tail lift, delivery appointment and other accessorials as explicit options on the quote.

DDP is DAP plus import clearance. The seller pays the freight, the duties and any import taxes, and delivers ready for unloading. For the buyer it is the simplest possible arrangement: one price, one invoice, no customs work.

The obligation it hides is fiscal. To clear import and account for local consumption taxes, the seller normally needs a registration or a fiscal representative in the destination country. Agreeing DDP without one produces a shipment stuck at a border and an unexpected tax bill.

On intra-EU road lanes there is no import clearance, so DDP and DAP differ mainly on paper. On a lane crossing into a non-EU country — Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Morocco — the difference is substantial. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and prices transport only; it does not calculate duties, file declarations or act as a customs representative.

Large retail and industrial receiving docks work on booking systems: a vehicle without a slot is turned away regardless of what it is carrying. Smaller consignees ask instead for a phone call an hour ahead. Both are appointments, and both remove flexibility from the driver's round.

The charge is small per shipment, but the operational cost of missing it is not: a refused delivery becomes a redelivery, and a redelivery costs a second full delivery attempt plus storage in between.

For a broker the appointment requirement is a data field, not a note in an email. It has to survive from the quote to the transport order or it will be lost exactly once — on the shipment where it mattered.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, carries the appointment requirement as a priced option from the quote form through to the S-YYYY-NNNN shipment record, and the broker and the customer can confirm the slot through the portal messaging thread attached to the shipment.

Windows are a constraint on the carrier's route, not a feature of the freight. A two-hour afternoon slot at a distribution centre may make a delivery impossible to combine with any other stop, which is why narrow windows attract a surcharge or a dedicated vehicle.

Three variants behave very differently on price: standard reception hours, which cost nothing; a booked appointment, which the carrier prices as an accessorial; and a hard timed delivery, which often requires a dedicated trip.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and captures the required window on the quote request, in the broker's white-label customer portal, and prices the delivery appointment as an option when the carrier grid defines one. Discovering the constraint after booking is what turns a margin into a loss.

The Protocol does not change the substance of the CMR: the particulars, the liability regime and the deadlines are identical. What it adds is a framework for authentication — the electronic note must be signed by a reliable method, and the data must remain complete and accessible to the parties entitled to it.

The practical constraint is ratification. Both the states involved in a movement must be party to the Protocol for the electronic note to have the same status as paper, so international lanes still see a mix of paper and electronic documents.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and is not an e-CMR platform: it does not issue, sign or transmit electronic consignment notes and holds no accreditation. It stores documents attached to the S-YYYY-NNNN shipment record, which covers scanned notes and proofs of delivery but is not a substitute for a compliant e-CMR system.

EDI predates web APIs and remains widespread precisely because it is stable: an agreed message format, an agreed transport, and both parties commit to it for years. In road freight the common messages cover transport orders, status reports and invoices.

The cost is setup. Each connection is a project between two IT teams, which is why EDI is normal between a large shipper and a large carrier network, and effectively unavailable to a two-person brokerage buying from twelve regional hauliers.

Cargavo has no EDI and no carrier API. That is a deliberate position: it prices from the rate grids you rebuild, so a carrier with no IT department is a first-class carrier in the system. If your workflow depends on receiving EDI status messages from carriers, Cargavo is not the right tool.

The 1,200 × 800 mm footprint is not an arbitrary size: it divides the interior width of a standard European trailer into a repeatable pattern, which is why a tautliner is commonly described as taking 33 Euro pallets on the floor. The alternative industrial format measures 1,200 × 1,000 mm and yields 26 floor positions on the same trailer.

EPAL pallets are exchangeable, which creates a second commercial dimension: a delivery may be made against a pallet exchange, against a pallet account, or without exchange, and each convention changes who owns the empty pallets afterwards. That is a contractual matter between the parties, not a freight rate.

For pricing, the relevant figures are the footprint and the stackability. A non-stackable Euro pallet occupies 0.40 loading metres on a 2.40 m loading width. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers: the pallet count and the stackability flag captured on a quote feed the pallet and mpl_bracket grid models directly.

EXW places the maximum obligation on the buyer and the minimum on the seller. Delivery occurs when the goods are placed at the buyer's disposal at the named place, not loaded onto any vehicle, and risk passes there.

The practical friction is loading. In reality the seller almost always loads the truck, because it owns the forklift and the dock, which leaves an unwritten gap between what the Incoterm says and what happens. FCA at the seller's premises describes that situation correctly and is usually the better choice.

A second friction is export clearance, which under EXW is the buyer's responsibility even though the goods are in the seller's country. For a freight broker, EXW means the buyer is the customer. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and holds each party as a distinct customer with its own margin rule and portal access.

The broker's product is a commitment, not a truck. It sells a shipper a price and a delivery promise, then buys the capacity to honour them from carriers it has selected, referenced and negotiated with. The value it adds is coverage, price knowledge and single-point accountability across a fragmented carrier market.

Because it contracts in its own name, the broker carries the commercial risk. If the carrier fails, the customer's claim is against the broker. That legal position is the entire reason margin exists — it is compensation for risk and for the work of matching demand to capacity, not a mark-up on a pass-through.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers built for teams of two to twenty-five people. It rebuilds the broker's own carrier rate grids, computes buy and sell from a single engine, keeps buy rates and margins in a private record the customer can never read, and gives each customer a white-label portal in English, French, Spanish or German.

Chartering is the buy-side activity behind most full truckload and part load work. The charterer describes the movement, collects prices from several carriers, checks that the equipment and the dates fit, and confirms one — usually within the same day, because the capacity moves.

What makes it different from grid buying is that the price is negotiated per shipment. There is no bracket to read: the number depends on the corridor, the season, the direction and whether the carrier expects a return load. The same lane can cost noticeably more or less two weeks apart.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and supports both models: standing carrier grids for recurring groupage, and a buy rate entered per shipment for chartered movements. In both cases the sell price is derived server-side with a margin expressed as p/(1-m) or as an absolute amount, and the customer sees the sell price alone.

The exchange solves one problem very well: finding a truck for a load, or a load for a truck, today. Members post offers, search by lane and date, and contact each other directly. European examples include TimoCom, Teleroute and Trans.eu; the price is a subscription for access, not a commission on the movement.

What an exchange does not do is run the business around the movement. It does not hold your customers' agreed rates, does not compute your sell price from your buy rate, does not keep your margin per customer and does not stop your customer seeing what you paid.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and is complementary to an exchange, not a replacement for it. Cargavo does not search capacity, does not post loads and has no integration with any freight exchange. It prices from your own carrier rate grids, applies your margin server-side, and shows customers a sell price only.

The forwarder's distinguishing feature is scope rather than legal form. Where a road broker sells a lane, a forwarder sells a door-to-door movement that may involve a truck, a vessel, an aircraft, a customs declaration and a warehouse, each contracted separately and presented as one service.

In Germany the arrangement is the Speditionsvertrag of the Commercial Code, with the ADSp commonly incorporated as standard terms; in France the commissionnaire de transport plays the same organising role. In practice the boundary with a broker is commercial, not legal: many companies do both.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and forwarders alike, because the pricing problem is identical — buy from a carrier grid, apply a customer-specific margin server-side, present a sell price only. Cargavo does not file customs declarations, does not book ocean or air capacity and has no carrier API or EDI.

Errors on freight invoices are rarely fraud and almost always mechanical: a re-measured pallet, a fuel index applied at the wrong month, a waiting-time line nobody expected, a delivery reclassified as a second attempt. Each is small; together they eat a margin that was thin to begin with.

The audit needs one thing to be possible at all: the agreed buy rate must still exist, attached to the shipment, in a form a human can compare. A price that lived only in an email thread cannot be audited three weeks later.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and keeps the computed buy rate, the sell rate and the margin in a private record on every Q-YYYY-NNNN quote and S-YYYY-NNNN shipment, so a carrier invoice can be checked against what was priced. Cargavo does not receive, parse or pay carrier invoices, and has no accounting or EDI connection.

A quote is only useful if it is reproducible. Four inputs decide the number: the lane (postcode to postcode, or zone to zone), the size of the shipment (weight, dimensions, pallet count), the service level (transit time, delivery window, tail lift) and the validity date, because fuel indices and tariffs move.

A complete quote separates the base transport price from the fuel surcharge and from priced options such as tail lift, ADR or ad valorem insurance. Bundling everything into one figure is what makes a quote impossible to defend when the invoice arrives higher.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers: it produces the quote from your own carrier rate grids, stores it under a Q-YYYY-NNNN reference, and keeps the buy rate and the margin in a private record the customer cannot read. Converting an accepted quote into a shipment creates an S-YYYY-NNNN reference. Amounts carry their currency — EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD or PLN.

A tender is not a quote request multiplied. It has a fixed calendar, a fixed lane list with volumes, a fixed rate template that every bidder must fill in the same way, and award rules stating how much of each lane goes to the winner and to the backup.

For a broker, the work is not the price but the modelling: bidding a lane at a rate you cannot buy for twelve months is worse than not bidding it. Most tender losses on margin come from bidding lanes with no committed carrier capacity behind them.

Tenders typically run annually for industrial shippers and are increasingly split into mini-tenders per quarter for volatile categories.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers rather than a tender platform: it does not run bid events. What it does is hold the awarded rates as structured grids afterwards, so the tender you won is the tariff your team quotes from the next morning.

FTL removes the hub. The vehicle loads at origin, drives to destination and unloads — two handling events instead of four — which is why it is the fastest and least damaging way to move freight, and the only sensible one for anything fragile or high-value.

A standard European tautliner semi-trailer offers 13.6 loading metres and 33 Euro pallet positions. Directive 96/53/EC sets the ordinary maximum authorised combination weight at 40 tonnes for international traffic, so payload is bounded by the tractor and trailer tare rather than by a tariff bracket.

The price is a trip price. Distance, equipment type, waiting time, the driver's hours and, above all, the probability of a paying return load determine it, which is why the same lane can be quoted very differently two weeks apart. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers: FTL is typically bought spot and sold with an absolute margin per shipment rather than a percentage, and the engine supports both.

Diesel is one of the largest and most volatile lines in a haulier's cost structure. Rather than reopening a tariff every time it moves, carriers fix a base rate at the start of the contract and then publish a surcharge percentage that tracks an index — weekly, monthly or quarterly.

The surcharge is applied to the base transport price, not to the whole invoice: accessorial charges are usually excluded, and whether the minimum charge is included depends on the tariff conditions.

For a broker the surcharge is a pass-through with a timing risk. If the buy-side surcharge updates monthly and the sell-side quote is valid for 30 days, one of the two will be wrong for part of the period.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers: the indexed fuel surcharge is a first-class concept in its engine, configured per grid, applied on the buy side and the sell side in the same pass.

On a shipment bought at 120 EUR and sold at 150 EUR, the gross margin is 30 EUR, or 20% of the sell price. Note which denominator is used: 30 divided by 150 is 20%, 30 divided by 120 is 25%. The first is the margin, the second is the markup, and confusing them is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in brokerage.

Gross margin only becomes trustworthy once the buy rate is complete. A margin computed on a base tariff, with the fuel surcharge and the tail-lift charge arriving on the invoice three weeks later, is a forecast rather than a result.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, stores the buy price, the sell price and the resulting margin on every quote and every shipment, in the shipment's own currency, so margin per customer and per lane is a report rather than a monthly spreadsheet exercise.

Carriers use this shape when the cost structure genuinely changes at a certain size. Below the threshold the cost is dominated by handling and the last mile, so a flat price is honest. Above it, line-haul capacity dominates and a proportional rate is honest.

A typical grid reads: up to 100 kg, 42 EUR flat; above 100 kg, 21 EUR per 100 kg. At 100 kg the two branches should meet, and when they do not, there is a step in the price curve that a customer will eventually notice — usually on the shipment that sits one kilogram over.

The threshold is applied to chargeable weight, not gross weight, which is where hybrid grids most often surprise people.

In Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, this is the hybrid_weight grid type, with the threshold, the flat amount and the rate above configured per zone.

Incoterms 2020 contains eleven rules. Seven apply to any mode of transport — EXW, FCA, CPT, CIP, DAP, DPU, DDP — and four apply only to sea and inland waterway transport: FAS, FOB, CFR and CIF. The 2020 revision renamed DAT to DPU and raised the insurance level required under CIP.

An Incoterm settles three questions and no others: who pays for which leg, where the risk of loss passes, and who handles export and import formalities. It is not a payment term, not a transfer of ownership and not a substitute for a transport contract.

For a freight broker the Incoterm decides who is actually the customer and who pays the invoice, which is why it belongs on the quote request rather than in a later phone call. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and prices the movement it is asked to price; it does not file customs declarations and has no customs or EDI connection.

The choice of denominator is the whole point. A trailer carrying 6 tonnes on 13.6 loading metres is at roughly 25% of payload but 100% of floor, and only the second number describes what the carrier can still sell. Reporting the wrong one hides a full truck behind a low figure.

Load factor is a carrier metric, not a broker one, but it explains broker pricing. A carrier that expects to fill the vehicle quotes differently from one that does not, which is why the same lane costs more in the empty direction and why a backhaul is cheap.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and does not plan loading, allocate vehicles or compute fill rates: it has no fleet management, no telematics and no load-planning module. It prices shipments from the rate grids you rebuild and keeps buy, sell and margin per shipment.

The formula is a footprint divided by the usable width: LDM = (length × width) / loading width, in metres. Standard European tautliner trailers are built around a nominal loading width of 2.40 m and a loading length of 13.6 m, which is where the familiar figure of 13.6 LDM per trailer comes from.

A Euro pallet of 1.20 × 0.80 m placed with its 1.20 m side across the trailer occupies 0.80 × 1.20 / 2.40 = 0.40 LDM. An industrial pallet of 1.20 × 1.00 m occupies 0.50 LDM. Both assume the pallet cannot be stacked; a stackable pallet halves the floor space it consumes because another one sits on top.

Loading metres become a price through a conversion the tariff states, in kilogrammes per LDM. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and implements this as mpl_bracket, one of its four grid models, so an LDM tariff is priced natively rather than approximated with a weight tariff.

The economics are consolidation. A groupage carrier collects small consignments locally, trunks them between hubs at night, sorts them at a cross-dock and delivers them locally the next morning. Each shipment pays a share of a vehicle it never fills, which is why a 300 kg pallet moves for a fraction of what a truck costs.

The price comes from a rate grid rather than a negotiation. The lane resolves to a zone, the shipment resolves to a chargeable weight, and the intersection of the two gives a rate — often per 100 kg, with a minimum charge for the smallest consignments and a paying-for rule at each bracket boundary.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and prices groupage from the broker's own carrier grids: weight_zone for classic weight-by-zone tariffs, pallet for per-pallet tariffs, mpl_bracket for loading-metre tariffs and hybrid_weight for flat-rate-then-per-kilo tariffs. Buy and sell come from one engine, so they cannot disagree.

The two words describe the same profit from opposite ends. Markup divides profit by cost. Margin divides the same profit by the selling price. Because the selling price is always the larger denominator, the margin percentage is always smaller than the markup percentage for the same money.

The confusion is expensive because it is systematic and quiet. A broker who intends a 20% margin but applies a 20% markup collects 24 EUR instead of 30 EUR on a 120 EUR buy rate — a fifth of the intended profit, on every shipment, indefinitely.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, and its engine expresses percentage margins as margin on the sell price, using p/(1-m), or as an absolute amount per weight bracket. The rule is stored per customer and applied server-side, so the intended margin and the invoiced margin are the same number.

Every carrier has a cost that does not shrink with the shipment: a driver stops, a pallet is scanned, a delivery is attempted. The minimum charge protects that cost. On a European groupage tariff it commonly sits between 35 EUR and 60 EUR per shipment, and it is quoted per zone.

The order of operations matters more than the number. If the minimum applies before the fuel surcharge, the surcharge is calculated on the raised amount; if it applies after, it is not. Two carriers with identical minimums can therefore invoice different totals for the same shipment.

Minimums are also where broker margins quietly disappear. A grid with a 45 EUR minimum quoted at a 15% margin still yields only 7.94 EUR on a shipment that hits the floor.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, holds the minimum charge as part of the grid and applies it in the order you configure, so the quoted price matches the invoice.

The metric is only meaningful once the definition is fixed, because three choices change the result entirely: whether the clock is the committed transit time or a booked window, whether the collection day counts, and whether failures caused by the consignee are excluded.

Measured per carrier and per lane, it is the number that justifies paying more for a better carrier. Measured as one company-wide figure, it says almost nothing, because a weak lane and a strong lane average into a meaningless middle.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and stores shipment dates and statuses per carrier and per customer, which is the raw material for the calculation. Cargavo publishes no benchmark and no industry average: the only credible on-time figure is the one computed from your own shipments.

The unit exists because floor positions, not cubic metres, are what a groupage trunk actually runs out of. A standard European tautliner offers 33 Euro pallet positions or 26 industrial pallet positions on the floor; a double-deck trailer adds a second layer of positions above.

A pallet space is consumed for the entire trunk leg even if the pallet is 40 cm high. That is why stackability is a commercial term and not a detail: a pallet declared stackable lets the carrier place a second one above it and sell the same position twice, which is the reason stackable rates are lower.

Expressed in floor length, one Euro pallet position is 0.40 loading metres. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, and its pallet grid model prices directly on the number of pallets by zone — useful precisely when a carrier sells positions rather than kilogrammes.

Palletizing converts a pile of cartons into a countable unit. That is a pricing fact before it is a logistics one: a network that handles pallets can charge per pallet, per pallet space or per loading metre, whereas loose cartons force a weight-and-volume calculation on every item.

A correctly built pallet does not overhang its base, is wrapped or strapped as one block, carries a readable label on at least two faces, and declares whether anything may be placed on top of it. Overhang is the most expensive defect: a load 1.25 m wide on a 1.20 m pallet no longer fits the pattern the network was designed around and is often reclassified.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and supports a native pallet grid model, pricing per pallet count by zone, alongside weight_zone, mpl_bracket and hybrid_weight. The pallet count declared on a Q-YYYY-NNNN quote carries into the shipment record.

The economics are the opposite of full truckload: the network runs on very high volumes of small, machine-sortable items, so the marginal cost of a parcel is low but the constraints are strict. Operators publish maximum weight, maximum length and maximum girth per parcel, and anything outside those limits is surcharged or refused.

Volumetric weight matters more here than anywhere else, because a sorting belt is dimensioned in centimetres. Parcel tariffs typically express the ratio as a divisor in cubic centimetres per kilogramme rather than as kilogrammes per cubic metre.

Parcel networks are usually outside a freight broker's buy portfolio: they sell directly to shippers on published tariffs. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and focuses on groupage, part load and full truckload grids, though a parcel-style tariff with flat rates below a threshold maps onto the hybrid_weight grid model.

The defining feature is the absence of a hub. A part load is combined with one or two other consignments at the point of loading and runs to destination directly, so it is handled twice like a full truckload rather than four times like groupage. Transit times are close to a direct trip.

Volumes typically run from six to twenty pallets, or roughly 4 to 13 loading metres. Above 13.6 LDM the shipment is a full truckload; below six pallets a groupage tariff is usually cheaper because the network amortises the vehicle over far more consignments.

Pricing follows floor space, not kilogrammes: a part load is a section of trailer. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and prices part loads through the mpl_bracket grid model, on loading-metre brackets by zone, or through the pallet model when a carrier sells positions.

The rule fixes an absurdity created by brackets. Suppose the 100-199 kg bracket is 0.55 EUR per kilo and the 200-499 kg bracket is 0.25 EUR per kilo. A 190 kg shipment computed in its own bracket costs 104.50 EUR; declared at 200 kg in the next bracket it costs 50 EUR. Paying-for takes the lower of the two, so the customer is invoiced 50 EUR for 190 kg.

Applied properly, the rule makes the price curve monotonic: the price never falls as weight rises. Applied by hand, it is the single most commonly forgotten step in manual quoting, and each omission is money handed back to nobody — the customer pays more than the tariff allows and eventually finds out.

Cargavo evaluates paying-for automatically on every weight_zone and hybrid_weight grid, on the buy side and the sell side, because the same engine computes both.

Pallet networks price this way because their unit of capacity is a floor position, not a kilogram. The grid reads: zone B, three pallets, 187 EUR. Simple to quote, simple to check on an invoice.

The catch is always in the fine print. Each pallet carries a weight ceiling — commonly 500, 700 or 1,000 kg depending on the network — and a height limit. Beyond either, the pallet counts as two, or the shipment reverts to a weight-based tariff. Half pallets and quarter pallets have their own rows.

Per-pallet grids are the easiest tariff to compare between carriers, because the unit is unambiguous, and the hardest to compare against a weight-zone tariff, because the two count different things.

In Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, this is the pallet grid type. Weight ceilings and pallet formats are configured per grid, so a 900 kg pallet is not quoted at the 500 kg price by accident.

The distinction is a payment instruction, not a transfer of risk — that belongs to the Incoterm. A shipment can perfectly well be sold EXW and still be despatched freight collect, and the two statements do not contradict each other.

In practice, collect shipments are the ones that generate disputes. The carrier delivers, the receiver refuses the freight invoice because the purchase order said otherwise, and the broker is caught between two customers with two versions of the agreement.

Three defences work: the payment term written explicitly on the consignment note, a rate agreed with the paying party before pickup, and a quote reference the invoice can point back to.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, links every shipment to the quote it came from through the Q-YYYY-NNNN and S-YYYY-NNNN references, so the price that was agreed is always retrievable — whoever ends up paying it.

The value of an engine is not speed, it is determinism: the same inputs must return the same price today and in six months, on the broker's screen and on the customer's portal. That requires the order of operations to be written down once — chargeable weight, then bracket selection, then paying-for, then minimum charge, then fuel surcharge, then options, then margin, then rounding.

The classic failure mode in brokerage software is two engines: one that computes the buy rate and another that computes the sell rate. They start identical and diverge at the first tariff exception, and every divergence is a margin that was not what anyone believed.

Cargavo runs a single engine for both sides. The buy price is the engine without margin rules; the sell price is the same engine with them. The authoritative price is always recomputed server-side, so a value sent from a browser can never become the price of record.

The POD is the last piece of evidence a broker can obtain without a dispute. It fixes three facts: that delivery happened, when it happened, and in what apparent condition the goods were received. A signature with the mention "damage to one pallet, film torn, contents to be checked" is worth far more than a clean signature and a phone call two days later.

Commercially, it is also the trigger for invoicing on many terms and the document a customer asks for when its own client queries a delivery. A POD that takes a week to retrieve costs more in chasing time than the margin on the shipment.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and stores documents against the S-YYYY-NNNN shipment record, so the POD, the consignment note and the quote that priced the movement live in one place. Cargavo does not capture signatures and has no driver application or telematics.

Rounding sounds trivial until two systems disagree. A tariff at 0.2733 EUR per kilo on 187.4 kg gives 51.2117 EUR. Rounded to the cent that is 51.21 EUR; with the weight first rounded up to 190 kg it is 51.93 EUR. Neither is wrong — but only one matches the carrier's invoice.

Three decisions define the rule: what is rounded (the weight, the intermediate price, the final total), in which direction (up, down, half-up) and to what step (0.01, 0.10, 1.00, or the next 10 kg). Carriers publish these in the tariff conditions, often in a sentence that is easy to skip.

Rounding also compounds: a rounded buy price feeding a margin calculation and then a rounded sell price can drift a euro or two per shipment, which is invisible per quote and material per year.

Cargavo exposes rounding as an explicit setting per grid rather than hiding it in code, so a broker can reproduce the carrier's own arithmetic.

Zones are how a carrier compresses geography into a table. A French domestic tariff might use one zone per department, a European tariff one zone per country or per country group, and an express network four or five concentric zones around each hub.

Two shipments in the same zone cost the same in the tariff even when one goes to a city ring road and the other to a mountain village. That is why zone definitions carry exceptions: island surcharges, remote-area lists, and postcodes served on fewer days per week.

Zones are the first thing to check when comparing two carriers. A quote that looks 8% cheaper often turns out to use a coarser zone map that dumps a difficult postcode into a cheap zone the carrier will later reprice.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, stores each carrier's zone map with its grid, so the same destination can be zone B for one carrier and zone C for another without any manual reconciliation.

An RFQ is a single-shipment question, unlike a freight tender, which puts a whole lane portfolio out to bid. It arrives by email, phone or a web form, and the answer time is the metric that decides whether the broker wins it.

A complete RFQ carries eight fields: pickup postcode, delivery postcode, gross weight, dimensions or pallet count, stackability, ready date, service level and the options required (tail lift, appointment, ADR). Anything missing has to be chased, and chasing is where hours go.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, exposes a white-label customer portal where the broker's own customers submit an RFQ against a structured form. When a rate grid covers the lane, the portal returns a price immediately. When no grid covers it, the request is stored as a quote request the broker prices manually — the missing lane never becomes a lost enquiry. Each request becomes a Q-YYYY-NNNN record.

A sell rate is derived, not typed. When it is typed, two things go wrong: it stops matching any tariff, and it stops being reproducible when the person who typed it is on holiday.

The derivation has one decision in it — how the margin is expressed. A percentage margin on the sell price uses the formula p/(1-m): a 120 EUR buy rate at a 20% margin sells at 150 EUR, not 144 EUR. An absolute margin adds a fixed amount per shipment or per bracket, which suits volatile spot buying.

Margins are usually set per customer, sometimes per customer and per weight bracket, because a 50 kg parcel and a 3-tonne shipment do not carry the same handling effort.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, recalculates the sell rate server-side on every quote, so a price altered in a browser can never become the price of record.

The shipment is the unit everything else attaches to. A quote prices a hypothetical shipment; a booking turns it into a real one; the consignment note evidences it; the proof of delivery closes it; the carrier invoice settles it. Losing the link between those five artefacts is what makes reconciliation painful.

Splitting matters too. Two pallets going to two consignees are two shipments even if they travel on one truck, because each has its own delivery obligation and its own document trail.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and gives every shipment an S-YYYY-NNNN reference, created when an accepted Q-YYYY-NNNN quote is converted. Buy rate, sell rate and margin live in a private record attached to it, invisible to the customer, while documents, messages and status stay on the shipment itself.

Tracking has two distinct sources. Carrier-generated events come from scanning at collection, at each hub and at delivery, and are only as good as the carrier's own system. Broker-maintained statuses are entered by the broker's team from what it knows, and are available for every carrier including the smallest.

For a broker without carrier integrations, the second kind is what customers actually get, and it is often more useful: a status the broker has confirmed beats an automated event nobody has read.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and publishes broker-maintained shipment statuses and messaging in the customer's white-label portal, against the S-YYYY-NNNN reference. Cargavo has no carrier API, no EDI and no telematics: it does not receive automatic scan events from carrier systems.

Most disputes on a freight invoice start with a shipper declaration. The carrier prices on what was declared, then measures what actually arrives at the dock, and any gap becomes a correction. Accurate dimensions and an honest stackability flag are worth more to a shipper than a hard negotiation on the rate.

The shipper is not automatically the payer: under a prepaid arrangement it pays, under a collect arrangement the consignee does, and the Incoterm on the sale contract determines which. Naming the payer at the quote stage avoids an invoicing dispute later.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers: the broker's shippers are its customers, each with its own margin rule, its own history and its own access to a white-label portal where it can simulate a price, request a quote and follow shipments. A customer never sees buy rates, margins, rate grids or any other customer.

Spot pricing dominates full truckload and anything urgent, oversized or seasonal. The number moves with the balance of trucks and loads on the lane that week: harvest, holiday shutdowns, a strike at a port, or simply an empty vehicle looking for a return load.

Brokers work spot rates by calling carriers or posting on a freight exchange, then adding a margin. The margin is usually absolute rather than a percentage, because the buy rate is volatile and a percentage would swing the sell price for no reason connected to the service.

Spot and contract are complementary, not rivals. A broker typically covers predictable groupage volume with contract grids and absorbs the peaks at spot.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, prices grid-covered lanes automatically and lets you record a manual buy rate for a spot shipment, then applies your margin rule to it — spot quotes end up in the same Q-YYYY-NNNN history as grid quotes.

The declaration is binary at the point of quoting and physical at the point of loading. A pallet marked stackable lets the carrier sell the column above it; marked non-stackable, the same pallet blocks that column for the whole trunk leg and the tariff prices it as full floor space.

In loading metres, the effect is exact: a non-stackable Euro pallet occupies 0.40 LDM, a stackable one 0.20 LDM. On a shipment of six pallets that is the difference between 2.4 LDM and 1.2 LDM — and, under a tariff stating 1,750 kg per LDM, between an equivalence of 4,200 kg and 2,100 kg.

Declaring stackable freight that turns out not to be is the most common cause of a corrected invoice. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and captures stackability as a field on the quote request, in the broker's white-label customer portal, so the assumption behind the Q-YYYY-NNNN price is recorded rather than remembered.

Loading docks exist at warehouses. They do not exist at building sites, small shops, workshops or private addresses — which is where a large share of groupage deliveries actually go. Without a dock, the only way a pallet leaves the trailer is a tail lift plus a pallet truck.

Tail-lift vehicles are a smaller part of any fleet, so the service has to be booked, not assumed. Carriers price it per shipment or per pallet, and the charge lands on the invoice whether or not the broker quoted it.

The practical limits matter: a tail lift has a working load limit, commonly between 1,000 kg and 2,000 kg depending on the unit, and needs firm level ground with clearance behind the vehicle.

In Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, tail lift is a first-class priced option: it is asked for on the quote form, priced from the grid, and carried into the shipment record so the invoice check has something to compare against.

The ATP Agreement classifies both the equipment and the temperature class it can hold, which is why a refrigerated tariff is never comparable to a general-cargo tariff on the same lane. Frozen goods and chilled goods are different products with different setpoints, and mixing them in one vehicle requires a multi-temperature trailer with movable bulkheads.

Three cost drivers separate it from dry freight: fuel for the refrigeration unit, restricted loading patterns because air must circulate, and the documentation burden of a continuous temperature record that the consignee may demand at delivery.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and treats temperature-controlled work as its own carrier grid, since the rates, the ratios and the options differ from dry cargo. Temperature setpoints and equipment class belong in the shipment record; Cargavo does not monitor temperature and has no telematics or carrier API connection.

The word covers very different products. A shipper's TMS optimises the shipper's own transport spend. A carrier's TMS dispatches vehicles and drivers. A broker's TMS is a buy-and-sell system: it stores carrier rate grids, computes a cost, applies a margin, produces a customer-facing price and keeps the two apart.

The test of a broker TMS is where the margin lives. If the sell price is typed by a human into a document, the system is a document generator. If the sell price is derived from the buy rate by a rule the system owns, it is a TMS.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and forwarders with teams of two to twenty-five people. It rebuilds your own carrier rate grids, computes buy and sell from a single engine, keeps financials in a private record, and gives every customer a self-service portal, white-labelled on the Scale plan. Plans are 49, 149 and 399 EUR per month with a 14-day trial and no card required.

The counting convention is where quotes and expectations diverge. A "24-hour" groupage service usually means delivery on the working day after collection, not twenty-four clock hours, and a collection made after the cut-off time starts the clock the following day.

Transit time is a property of the lane and the service, not of the shipment. A groupage consignment is handled four times and waits for a trunk departure at each hub, which is why it is slower than a direct part load or full truckload on the same distance.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and stores transit time per carrier and per zone alongside the rate, so the answer given to a customer comes from the same record as the price. Cargavo does not track vehicles and has no telematics or carrier API.

The ratio is the exchange rate between a vehicle's two scarce resources. Written as 250 kg/m³ it says a cubic metre is worth 250 kg of tariff; written as 4,000 cm³/kg it says the same thing from the other side. Converting between the two forms is one division: 1,000,000 divided by the divisor gives the kilogrammes per cubic metre.

Common published forms include the IATA air-cargo standard of 6,000 cm³/kg, equal to 167 kg/m³, and the kilogramme-per-cubic-metre notation used by most European road groupage tariffs. Because the ratio reflects a specific network's vehicles and handling costs, two carriers on the same lane routinely publish different ones.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and stores the ratio on the carrier rate grid, not as a global setting. Comparing two carriers on the same shipment therefore compares two correct chargeable weights rather than one assumption applied twice.

The calculation has two steps. Compute the volume in cubic metres — length × width × height, in metres, per item, summed — then multiply by the tariff ratio expressed in kilogrammes per cubic metre. A pallet of 1.20 × 0.80 × 1.60 m holds 1.536 m³; at a stated ratio of 250 kg/m³ its volumetric weight is 384 kg.

Parcel and air tariffs often express the same idea as a divisor in centimetres. IATA's volumetric standard for air cargo is 6,000 cm³ per kilogramme, which is the same thing as 167 kg/m³. Road groupage tariffs usually publish the kilogramme-per-cubic-metre form directly.

Volumetric weight is not automatically the billed weight: it is one candidate. The chargeable weight is the highest of the gross weight, the volumetric weight and, where the tariff defines one, the loading-metre equivalence. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and stores the ratio on each carrier grid, so the same shipment can be priced correctly against several carriers at once.

Every tariff grants a free period — commonly stated in the conditions rather than the rate table — after which the clock starts. The cost is real: a driver's hours are legally limited, so an hour lost at a dock can cost a whole delivery round later in the day.

Waiting time is the accessorial that most often appears on a carrier invoice without appearing on the quote, because nobody could predict it. What can be predicted is the risk profile: unappointed deliveries to distribution centres, sites with a single dock, and slots at the start of a reception window.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and keeps quoted amounts and invoiced amounts against the same S-YYYY-NNNN shipment, so a waiting-time charge can be checked against the buy rate that was quoted and either recharged to the customer or absorbed knowingly.

Brackets exist because carriers sell handling and floor space in discrete units, not by the kilogram. A typical European groupage tariff uses brackets at 0-49, 50-99, 100-199, 200-299, 300-499, 500-999, 1000-1999, 2000-2999 kg and then per tonne.

Two consequences follow. First, the rate per kilogram falls as you move up: the 500-999 kg row is cheaper per kilo than the 100-199 kg row, which is the whole economic argument for consolidating shipments. Second, the price jumps at boundaries — which is exactly what the paying-for rule is designed to smooth out.

The bracket is selected on chargeable weight, so a light but bulky pallet can land three brackets higher than its scale weight suggests.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, keeps brackets exactly as your carrier wrote them and can carry a different margin per bracket, because a 50 kg parcel and a 2-tonne shipment rarely deserve the same percentage.

This is the classic groupage tariff and the most common grid in European road freight. Zones run across the columns, weight brackets down the rows. A 380 kg pallet to zone C lands in the 300-499 kg bracket, and the cell gives either a flat amount or a rate per 100 kg.

Two rules ride on top and change the result more often than people expect. Paying-for charges the shipment at the next bracket's minimum weight when that comes out cheaper. The minimum charge applies when the computed price falls below the tariff floor.

The weight used is never simply the scale weight: it is the chargeable weight, the highest of gross weight, volumetric weight and any loading-metre equivalence.

In Cargavo this is the weight_zone grid type. The same engine computes the buy rate from the grid and the sell rate by applying the customer's margin rule, so the two can never drift apart.

The reasoning is commercial, not cosmetic. A broker's competitive position rests on being the customer's transport department; a portal wearing a software vendor's logo advertises that the service is outsourced and invites the customer to look the vendor up.

What is branded in practice: the logo, the colour accent, the sender name on notification emails and the language the portal speaks. What is not: the software's own marketing site, which stays separate.

Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers and includes portal branding — the broker's logo and colours — in the customer portal, in English, French, Spanish or German, with amounts in EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD or PLN. Cargavo does not provide custom domains or a fully bespoke interface.