Freight Class & Density Calculator: Stop Getting Reweighed and Reclassed

The problem this kills

You quote a shipment, book it at the class you guessed, and three weeks later a reweigh-and-reclass adjustment lands on your invoice — at a premium, with a fee on top. It happens because the freight class was eyeballed instead of calculated. Density (pounds per cubic foot) decides the class for most freight, and density takes real numbers: length, width, height, and weight, run through a bracket table. Get the math wrong, or skip it, and the carrier does it for you later — and charges you for the privilege.

The maddening part is that the math is simple and the same every time. What's missing is a fast, consistent way for a shipping coordinator or customer-service rep to compute density, land on the right class, and record it — before the shipment goes out — so there's nothing to reclass later. You do not need to be a developer to build that.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for the people who quote and book freight. You enter an item's dimensions and weight (one at a time, or import a whole item master by CSV). The tool computes density in pounds per cubic foot, handles pallet vs. piece and stackability, and maps the density to a suggested LTL freight class using your density-to-class bracket table. The coordinator sees the suggested class with the math shown, then either confirms it or records an NMFC override (the official commodity code) with a reason. Only then is the class saved to the item profile — and exported back in the exact columns your TMS or ERP expects.

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 — how you classify freight today, the systems and spreadsheets you use, the exact fields and naming in your item data, your unit conventions (inches vs. centimeters, pounds vs. kilograms), your real bracket table, and your messy edge cases like mixed pallets and density-exempt commodities. 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, the density math, the bracket-table lookup, the single-item and CSV-import flows, the confirm/override gate, and the save-and-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 items, a complete audit trail of every suggested class, confirmation, and NMFC override (who, what, when, and why), a hard human-approval gate so no class is written to an item or quote until a person confirms it, and duplicate guards keyed on your SKU / item code so the same item can't be processed twice. The whole tool exists to make a careful human decision fast — the calculator suggests, a person commits.

Who it's for

Shipping coordinators, customer-service reps who quote freight, and logistics leads who are tired of surprise reweigh-and-reclass adjustments. If you can describe how you classify a shipment today, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be calculating your first real freight class this afternoon.