Outbound Shipping Request & Tracking

The problem this kills

Someone walks up to the mailroom: "I need to overnight this to a client by tomorrow." No charge code, no idea what service it needs, no record of who asked. The mailroom guesses a carrier, slaps on a label, and the cost lands in some catch-all account nobody reconciles. Multiply that by every "quick favor" shipment across the building and, at month end, finance is staring at a four-figure courier bill they can't break down by department, can't tie to a person, and can't tell which charges were expedited rush jobs that should never have been approved.

In most offices, outbound shipping is a verbal request and a sticky note. Nobody estimates the cost before sending, so the cheap-vs-expensive service decision happens by reflex. Expedited and high-cost shipments go out with no extra sign-off. Charge codes are wrong or missing, so the spend can't be allocated. The same package gets requested twice and shipped twice. And when finance asks "why did the Marketing team spend $2,300 on overnight shipping last month?", the honest answer is "no idea."

This tool replaces the sticky note with a real request-estimate-approve-track loop - and a clean, provable record of every shipment, its cost, and the department that owns it.

What you'll build

A small internal web app, just for your team, that:

• Lets staff submit a shipping request: the recipient (name + address), what's in the box (contents / weight / dimensions), the service level they want, and the charge code for their department.
• Reads your rate guide and shows a cost estimate by service (ground vs 2-day vs overnight) so the requester and approver can see the trade-off before anything ships.
• Validates the charge code against your department list - and flags it if the code is unknown or the spend would blow a budget you've set.
• Routes each request to the mailroom lead or manager to approve the service level, charge code, and cost - and automatically requires an extra sign-off when the shipment is expedited or high-cost.
• Records the tracking number and actual cost once the label is created, against the requester's department.
• Tracks delivery status and rolls up shipping spend by department.
• Dedupes so the same requester + shipment can't be processed twice in a day.
• Exports the shipment ledger as CSV - for finance, for carrier reconciliation, in the exact columns your system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single markdown file you paste into Claude Code (a free AI coding agent). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, each step ending with a ready-to-paste prompt.

The most important part: the plan opens by interviewing you about your business. Before it writes a single line, the agent asks how shipments get requested today, which carriers and services you use, what your rate guide looks like, your real charge-code and department conventions, how you define "expedited" and "high-cost," who approves what, your typical and peak volumes, and your messy edge cases (international shipments, dangerous goods, a missing charge code, a recurring weekly ship). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build - so you get a tool shaped to your shipping process, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview and how the agent turns your answers into the data model.
• The full build: database, login, the request form, the rate-guide cost estimator, the charge-code validation, the approval screens, the expedited/high-cost extra sign-off, the email flow, the tracking + cost capture, the delivery status, the department spend roll-up, and the CSV exports.
• The hard human approval gate and the expedited/high-cost extra-sign-off logic.
• Verification steps so you can prove it works, and the CSV-export fallback so it's fully usable even before you connect it to a carrier API.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls finance and facilities actually need:

• Login so only your team can see or touch anything.
• Row-level security so people only ever see their own organization's shipments and spend.
• A complete audit trail - every request, estimate, approval, rejection, label, tracking entry, and cost is logged with who and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop gate - the AI drafts and estimates, but a mailroom lead or manager must approve the service level and charge code before any shipment is created; expedited or high-cost shipments need the extra sign-off.
• Duplicate guards so the same requester + shipment can't be processed twice in the same day.

Who it's for

Mailroom and shipping staff, office managers, and finance teams who own the shipping budget. If outbound shipments leave your building on a verbal "just send it," if expedited charges keep surprising you at month end, and if you can't break shipping spend out by department - this is for you. You don't need to write code. You need your staff/department list with charge codes, your carrier rate guide, and an afternoon-to-a-weekend.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.