Accessorial & Surcharge Quote Builder

The problem this kills

A linehaul rate is the easy part. The margin lives and dies in the accessorials - liftgate, residential, inside delivery, limited access, appointment, redelivery. Miss one on the quote and you have already lost the money: the carrier still bills it, the customer already agreed to the lower number, and now someone is eating the difference or having an awkward phone call.

The trouble is that accessorials hide in a person's memory. A busy rep quotes a residential liftgate delivery to a school (which is "limited access") and remembers two of the three charges. Multiply that by a hundred quotes a week and the leakage is real money. Spreadsheets do not stop it, because a spreadsheet will happily let you forget to ask the question in the first place.

This tool forces the questions. It walks the quoter through a checklist that is impossible to skip, looks the charges up from your own price list, applies fuel exactly the way your business does, and totals it - so the number that reaches the customer is the number you can actually deliver on.

What you'll build

A small, login-protected web app for your quoting desk:

• Pick a base linehaul rate (typed in, or pulled from a rate sheet you import).
• Answer a short accessorial questionnaire - liftgate? residential? inside delivery? limited-access location? appointment required? - with smart prompts (it flags residential and known limited-access locations for you).
• The tool adds the matching charges from your price list automatically.
• It applies fuel the way you tell it to (commonly to linehaul only) and assembles an all-in quote.
• The quoter reviews and approves the assembled quote before anything leaves the building.
• On approval, the quote is emailed to the customer and saved as a record with a unique quote number.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a complete, copy-paste runbook. You paste the whole thing into Claude Code and it builds the tool with you, one step at a time.

It opens by interviewing you about your business - your current quoting process, the systems and spreadsheets you use, how your accessorial codes and prices are named, your fuel rules, your typical and peak quote volumes, and your messy edge cases (the warehouse that is secretly limited-access, the customer who always needs an appointment). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up. That means the tool fits your quoting desk, not a generic template.

From there it walks you through accounts, the data model, the questionnaire logic, the limited-access location list and residential detection, the all-in calculation, the human review-and-approve gate, the customer email, and a clean CSV export.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each company only ever sees its own quotes and price list.
• A full audit trail - who built which quote, what they answered, and when it was approved and sent.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool assembles the quote, but a person reviews and approves it before it is emailed or saved as final.
• Duplicate guards keyed on the quote number, so the same quote can't be processed or sent twice.

Who it's for

Customer-service reps, inside sales, and the quoting desk at freight brokers, LTL carriers, and 3PLs - anyone who hands a price to a customer and then has to make that price stick.

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