Inbound Dock Appointment Portal
A self-service portal where inbound carriers request a receiving slot tied to a PO, the system checks dock-door and slot capacity, and your dock supervisor approves before the appointment is confirmed - so the dock stops being chaos and labor is planned.
Carriers self-book a receiving slot against a real PO, capacity is checked automatically, your supervisor approves each request, and everyone gets a confirmation, reminders, and a clean day-of dock board.
Before you start
- A free Supabase account
- A free Vercel account
- A free Resend account (for confirmation & reminder emails)
- A list of your inbound POs (a Google Sheet or CSV is fine - no integration required)
The problem this kills
Your receiving dock runs on phone calls, sticky notes, and a shared inbox. Carriers show up whenever they like - three trucks at 9am, none until 2pm. Your team either stands around or scrambles. POs get matched to loads by memory. Nobody knows what's coming until the truck is at the gate, so labor is impossible to plan and detention charges pile up.
The fix is not a six-figure dock-scheduling suite with a year-long rollout. It's a small, focused portal you can build yourself - one that fits your doors, your slots, and your approval rules.
What you'll build
A clean web portal with two sides:
- The carrier side: a driver or dispatcher enters a PO number, picks a date, and requests an open receiving slot. The system instantly checks it against your dock-door and slot capacity and against the PO, so they can only request something that's actually possible.
- The dock side: your receiving supervisor sees every pending request, reviews it against the day's load, and approves (assigning a specific door) or declines. On approval, the carrier gets a confirmation email; reminders go out before the appointment; and the team opens a live day-of dock board showing every confirmed truck, door, and time.
Nothing gets locked into a confirmed appointment until a human says yes.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a step-by-step runbook you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It builds the whole thing with you, in plain language, no prior coding needed.
It opens by interviewing you about your business - your doors, your slot lengths, your receiving hours, how you name POs and carriers, your busy windows, and your messy exceptions (live unloads vs. drop trailers, hazmat doors, appointments that span two slots). Then it reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up before it builds anything. You get a portal shaped to your dock, not a generic template.
Inside:
- The discovery interview and how your answers shape the data model
- A capacity model for doors and slots with a hard PO-match requirement
- The carrier request flow with instant capacity checking
- The supervisor approval queue and door assignment
- Confirmation + reminder emails via Resend
- A live day-of dock board
- The "No API yet?" fallback: import inbound POs from a CSV/Google Sheet and export confirmed appointments as a clean CSV in the columns your WMS or TMS expects
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a toy. Every build includes the controls that make an internal tool safe to actually use:
- Login so only your team and invited carriers can use it.
- Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own POs, slots, and appointments.
- A complete audit trail - who requested, who approved or declined, and exactly when.
- A human approval gate - the system drafts the appointment, but nothing is confirmed and written until your supervisor approves it.
- Duplicate guards so the same PO + carrier + date can't be booked twice by accident.
Who it's for
Warehouse receiving managers and dock supervisors who are tired of running the dock by phone, and who want carriers to self-book within rules they control. If you can describe how your dock works, you can build this.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.