Freight Claim Builder & Filer: Assemble a Claim Packet Carriers Can't Deny for Missing Info

The problem this kills

A pallet arrives crushed, a few cartons are short, or a shipment never shows up at all. You're owed money — but only if the claim you file is airtight. And freight claims get denied for the dumbest reasons: a missing proof of delivery, a BOL that doesn't match the invoice, no photos of the damage, a claim value that doesn't tie to anything, or a number that was filed twice and bounced as a duplicate. Each denial means re-work, a back-and-forth with the carrier, and a real risk the deadline lapses and you eat the loss.

The maddening part is that the information almost always exists somewhere — in your TMS or shipment spreadsheet, in the emailed BOL and invoice, in the signed POD, in the photos someone snapped at the dock. It's just scattered across systems and inboxes, and assembling it by hand for every claim is slow and easy to get wrong. What you need is something that gathers all of it into one complete, checklist-verified packet, computes the claim value the way your company actually calculates it, and won't let an incomplete claim go out the door. You do not need to be a developer to build that.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your claims and logistics/AR team. You open a claim against a shipment, attach the supporting documents (BOL, invoice, POD) and damage photos, and enter the damage or loss details. The tool computes the claim value by your rules — cost basis versus invoice value, freight included or not, depreciation or salvage where it applies — and runs a supporting-doc checklist that flags anything missing before the claim can move. Your claims manager reviews the assembled packet — shipment, docs, photos, value, and the checklist — and clicks Approve or Send back. Only an approved claim gets filed and written to a permanent claim record, with a clean packet you can export as a PDF/CSV and hand to (or upload for) the carrier.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your current claims process and who owns it, the TMS or spreadsheet your shipments live in, the exact fields and naming in your shipment and document data, your real claim-value rules (cost vs invoice, freight, depreciation, salvage), the carriers and claim types you deal with, your typical and peak claim volumes, and your messy edge cases. It reads a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then builds the tool around your answers instead of a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, importing shipments, uploading and attaching documents and photos to file Storage, the claim-value calculator, the doc-completeness checklist, the manager review-and-approve gate, and the filed-claim record and packet export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a real operation needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so people only see their own organization's claims and documents, a complete audit trail of every action and decision (who attached what, who computed the value, who approved, and when), a hard human-approval gate so no claim is filed until your claims manager signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on the claim number and BOL so the same claim can't be filed twice. The whole tool exists to make a careful human decision easy — the AI assembles and drafts, a person reviews and commits.

Who it's for

Freight claims specialists, OS&D (over, short & damaged) coordinators, and logistics or AR leads who chase carriers for recovery and are tired of claims bouncing for missing paperwork. If you can describe what a complete claim looks like in your world and how you calculate what you're owed, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be assembling your first real claim packet this weekend.