Empty Container Return Tracker
Track empty containers against their return-by date, catch street-turn opportunities, and stop per-diem from quietly stacking up on empties — with a coordinator approving every return and street-turn before it's scheduled.
A login-protected tracker that watches empty containers against their return-by dates, alerts you before per-diem starts, lets a coordinator approve return appointments and street-turn matches, and keeps a saved-charge log of what you avoided.
The problem this kills
Per-diem and detention on empty containers is money that leaks out one quiet day at a time. An import box gets unloaded, the empty sits in your yard or at a customer, and the clock keeps running toward the return-by date. Miss it by two days and you're paying for nothing. Worse, you had a perfectly good street-turn sitting right there — another export load that could have reused that exact empty — and nobody connected the dots in time.
Most drayage teams track this in a shared spreadsheet, a whiteboard, or somebody's head. None of those send you an alert at the right moment, none of them surface a street-turn match, and none of them keep a clean record of the charges you actually avoided.
What you'll build
A simple, login-protected web app for your drayage and import ops team. You load your empties (by hand, from a CSV, or pasted in), and the tool tracks each container against its return-by date and terminal restrictions. As deadlines approach it emails you. When a possible street-turn shows up — an export need that fits an empty you're already holding — it flags the match. A coordinator reviews and approves each return appointment or street-turn decision before anything gets scheduled, and the tool logs the per-diem you saved.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan opens by interviewing you about your actual operation — your terminals, your container types, how you get return-by dates, your free-time rules, and your messiest exceptions — so the tool is built around how your drayage desk really works, not a generic template. Then it walks your AI agent through building the database, the login, the alerting, the street-turn matcher, the approval gate, and the saved-charge log, one copy-paste prompt at a time. It includes a no-API fallback so you can run the whole thing today off a spreadsheet, and a clean CSV export in the columns your TMS or appointment system expects.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can see and touch the data.
- Row-level security so each company only ever sees its own containers.
- A full audit trail — who approved which return or street-turn, and exactly when.
- A human approval gate — the tool drafts the return appointment or street-turn; a coordinator reviews and approves before it's ever scheduled. Nothing commits on its own.
- Duplicate guards keyed on container number so the same box can't be tracked or returned twice.
Who it's for
Drayage coordinators and import operations teams who are tired of per-diem surprises and want a tracker that actually warns them in time — and helps them turn empties into export loads instead of charges.
You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor it to your yard.