Carrier Onboarding Checklist for Freight Brokers

Most carrier onboarding fails the same way: the sales meeting produces a rate sheet, the rate sheet goes in a folder, and three weeks later someone quotes from it and discovers that the zones are described in a footnote, the fuel surcharge is missing and nobody knows who to call for a booking. The fix is to send one request covering everything at once, because a carrier answers a nine-point list as readily as a one-point list, and each round-trip costs days.

Read the fourth column. Only four items stop you quoting — the rate sheet, the zones, the fuel rule and the option prices. That is the difference between commercially agreed and operationally onboarded, and it is the reason a carrier can be signed for a month and still not appear in a single quote. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires of 2 to 25 people, treats a carrier as onboarded only when those four are recorded as a structured grid rather than an attachment. For the wider context, see the carrier onboarding category.

Documents are the part of onboarding that feels like paperwork and behaves like insurance. Each one answers a question you will otherwise ask on the worst possible day.

• Operating licence — in the EU, hire-or-reward road haulage requires a Community licence, held by the operator with a certified copy carried in each vehicle. Ask for the licence number and the issuing authority, not just a scan, because a number can be checked and a scan cannot.
• Liability insurance certificate — read three fields: the insurer, the limit per event, and the expiry date. A certificate without a stated limit tells you nothing. Diary the expiry the day you file it.
• VAT registration — needed for cross-border invoicing, and a live registration is a basic sign the company is trading.
• Bank details — collect them on letterhead and confirm them by voice on a number you already had, never on a number printed in the email that carried the details. Invoice redirection fraud targets exactly this moment in a new relationship.
• ADR — if you will offer dangerous goods, ask which classes the carrier accepts and which it refuses. Almost every carrier refuses something, and the refusal list is more useful than the acceptance list.
• Subcontracting — ask in writing whether the carrier subcontracts and whether its liability cover extends to subcontracted movements. Your customer contracted with you; you contracted with this carrier. A stranger’s truck is still your problem.

None of these documents changes a price, which is why they are the first thing dropped when a shipment is urgent. Keep them with the carrier record rather than in a mailbox, and store the expiry dates as dates. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, is not a compliance or vetting service and does not verify licences for you — it holds the carrier record your grids attach to. Verification stays a human step, and it is a fast one when you ask for everything in the first message.

A rate sheet is a table surrounded by conditions, and the conditions are what decide the price. Run this check on the file before you accept it, and send back one message listing what is missing.

1. Grid shape — is this weight against zone, price per pallet, an LDM bracket, or a flat rate below a threshold with a per-unit rate above? The four shapes are covered in types of freight rate grids, and naming the shape out loud prevents mapping a pallet tariff onto a weight engine.
2. Destination keys — every zone must resolve to an explicit list of postcodes or country codes. A zone described as "Paris and inner suburbs" is not a key.
3. Minimum charge — ask whether it is per shipment or per zone, and whether it applies before or after fuel. Two carriers with identical tables produce different invoices on a 40 kg consignment purely on this answer.
4. Chargeable weight rule — the ratio is the carrier’s decision, not a universal constant. One tariff bills 1 m³ as 333 kg, another bills 1 LDM as 1,750 kg, a third bills 1,850 kg. Get the number in writing and check it against a real invoice; the loading meter calculator and the guide to LDM pricing show what the ratio does to a price.
5. Rounding — does the carrier round the chargeable weight up to the next 10 kg or 100 kg before reading the table, and does a shipment near a bracket boundary pay for the bracket above? See chargeable weight.
6. Validity window — an effective date, an end date, and the notice period for a change. A tariff with no dates is a tariff you cannot audit after the fact.

Once those six answers exist, the file itself becomes a mechanical rebuild job — cleaning merged cells, flattening zones, exporting CSV — covered in rebuilding an Excel rate sheet into a TMS. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, stores each of the six as a property of the grid rather than a habit in someone’s head, so the same rate sheet prices the same shipment identically whoever is at the keyboard.

Every tariff states a fuel surcharge percentage. Almost none state, in the same sentence, what the percentage multiplies. That single ambiguity is worth real money, and it is invisible until the first invoice arrives.

Take a shipment priced at 412,00 € of net transport, with a fuel surcharge of 9,4 %, a tail lift at 28,00 € and a delivery appointment at 12,00 €.

The gap is 3,76 € on one shipment. At 40 shipments a month with this carrier — 480 a year — that is 1 804,80 € a year of margin that exists or does not exist depending on how one line of a PDF is read. If you priced the customer on the first reading and the carrier invoices on the second, you absorb it silently, one shipment at a time.

The other three questions are about timing. Which index: a published national or European diesel index, or the carrier’s own internal figure? What base peg: the reference price at which the surcharge is zero, without which the percentage cannot be reconstructed. Which day: the percentage published on the first of the month usually derives from the previous month’s average, so there is a lag, and a quote issued on the 29th may be invoiced under the next percentage. Ask for the revision cadence and the notice, then write the rule down next to the grid — see fuel surcharge.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, applies an indexed fuel surcharge server-side at quote time and records the percentage used on that quote, so a later invoice dispute is a comparison of two numbers rather than a memory test. Cargavo does not fetch any diesel index automatically — the percentage is a value you maintain, which is exactly why the base peg and revision day belong in the onboarding checklist.

Accessorials are where a carrier tariff stops being a table and starts being a set of rules. The broker-side question is not what each charge means — it is what makes it fire.

Insurance deserves a number. The CMR Convention limits carrier liability to 8,33 SDR per kilogram of gross weight short. A 620 kg consignment is therefore covered up to 5 164,6 SDR — the SDR being a daily-published basket rate, so that ceiling is not even a fixed figure in euros. If the goods are worth 18 000 €, CMR cover is not the answer, and ad valorem is. At a rate of 0,35 € per 100 € declared, the premium is 18 000 ÷ 100 × 0,35 = 63,00 €, subject to the minimum premium. That is a quotable line, and the customer decides — but only if your quote form asks for a declared value. See ad valorem insurance and the fields listed in information needed to quote freight.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, carries tail lift, ADR, ad valorem insurance, delivery appointment and custom options as priced lines on the grid, so an option confirmed at onboarding is an option every quote offers. Options nobody recorded stay invisible until the carrier invoices them.

Transit times are the part of onboarding brokers copy fastest and verify least, because they look like a fact rather than a term. They are a term.

• Working days per zone — a table with one figure per zone, not a headline "24 to 48 hours" that quietly excludes the destinations that actually take four days.
• Cut-off hour — the time by which a collection request must be placed for the count to start today. A 12:00 cut-off and a 16:00 cut-off differ by a full day on every order placed in the afternoon.
• Day zero — does the count start on the pickup day or the following day? This is a one-word answer that shifts every delivery date you publish by 24 hours.
• Working-day calendar — which national holidays the carrier observes, and whether Saturday counts. On a cross-border lane, two calendars apply.
• Target or commitment — most groupage transit times are indicative, and a delay claim under CMR must be raised in writing within 21 days of delivery. Knowing which of the two you bought changes what you write on the quote.

The reason to be pedantic is that the number leaves the carrier’s document and enters your quote. A customer reading "delivery in 2 working days" on a document with your logo has been promised by you. If the underlying figure was a target counted from the day after pickup with a 12:00 cut-off, and the order arrived at 15:00, the honest promise on that quote is four days, not two. The safe habit is to publish the transit time with its cut-off and its counting rule, in the same sentence.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, keeps the accepted quote and the resulting shipment as one continuous record — Q-YYYY-NNNN becoming S-YYYY-NNNN — so the transit time you announced at quote stage stays attached to the shipment you are being asked about. Cargavo has no carrier API and no EDI connectivity, so it does not receive live status events from the carrier: what it holds is what you announced and what you recorded, which is precisely what a transit-time dispute turns on.

Collect contacts as roles, not people. A booking address that belongs to one dispatcher stops working the week that dispatcher is on holiday, and you will find out at 17:30 on a Friday.

• Booking — a shared mailbox or portal, plus the opening hours of the desk behind it.
• Account management — a named person with a direct number, for rate questions and exceptions.
• Claims — a dedicated address, because a claim sent to the booking desk is a claim nobody is measured on.
• Out of hours — the number that answers when a truck is at a closed door, and the hours during which it is answered.
• Accounts — where invoice queries go, and the payment terms in days from invoice date.

Then get the claim rules in writing, because the deadlines are short and they run from delivery, not from the day your customer complains. Under the CMR Convention, apparent loss or damage must be noted at the moment of delivery, on the consignment note. Non-apparent damage must be notified within 7 days of delivery, excluding Sundays and public holidays. A claim for delay requires a written reservation within 21 days of the goods being placed at the consignee’s disposal. Actions are generally time-barred after one year. Those are the outer limits set by the Convention; individual carriers add their own procedural requirements — photographs, a copy of the annotated CMR, the commercial invoice — and the time to learn which is now, not during a claim.

Write the deadlines on the carrier record and tell the operations team once. The practical trap is the seven-day window: a consignee who unpacks on day four and emails your customer on day eight has already ended the claim, and no amount of goodwill reopens it.

Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, keeps contextual messaging attached to each quote and shipment, so the exchange that establishes when a problem was reported sits on the record rather than in four personal mailboxes. Cargavo is not a claims management system and does not track claim deadlines for you — the record it gives you is evidence, and the diary stays yours.

The checklist has a shelf life. A tariff expires, an insurance certificate expires, a fuel base is renegotiated, an option price changes at renewal. Onboarding that lives in an email thread decays silently; onboarding that lives in a record decays visibly.

Four habits keep it usable:

• One grid per tariff, per currency, with dates. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, stores tariffs as weight_zone, pallet, mpl_bracket or hybrid_weight grids with an explicit currency from EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, CAD, MAD or PLN, so a Polish domestic tariff and a EUR export tariff never collide in the same table.
• Supersede, never overwrite. When a new tariff arrives, close the old grid on its last valid day and open a new one. A quote issued in March must still be explicable in June.
• Diary the earliest expiry. Licence, insurance certificate and tariff each carry a date. The one that matters is whichever comes first.
• Reconcile the first invoices. Take the first shipments run with the new carrier and compare transport, fuel and each option line against the invoice to the cent. This is the only step that actually proves the onboarding was correct, and it usually surfaces the fuel base question from earlier in this guide.

Two boundaries worth stating plainly. Cargavo does not connect to carrier APIs or EDI, so onboarding never waits on the carrier’s IT department — the trade-off, and the reasoning behind it, is set out in API vs EDI vs rate grid integration and the pillar on carrier integration for freight brokers. And Cargavo is not a tendering marketplace or a carrier directory: it prices the panel you already negotiated. Grid capacity and assisted rebuilds differ by plan — Starter 49 €/month, Growth 149 €/month, Scale 399 €/month, annual billing around two months free, 14-day free trial with no credit card, detailed on the pricing page.