Lane Rate Contract Tracker
Keep every contracted lane rate, its effective and expiry dates, and its fuel basis in one place - with alerts before rates expire or a general rate increase lands, and a procurement approval gate before any new rate becomes the rate of record.
A team-only web app that loads your lane rate contracts, gives an instant active-rate lookup by lane, alerts you before rates expire or a GRI takes effect, and keeps a full approved history - so an expired or wrong rate is never quoted again.
Before you start
- A free Supabase account
- A free Vercel account
- A free Resend account
- Your current lane rate list as a spreadsheet or CSV (origin/dest, equipment, rate, dates, fuel basis)
The problem this kills
Your contracted freight rates live in a tangle of spreadsheets, PDFs from carriers, and email threads. Someone quotes a lane off last quarter's tab. A rate quietly expired three weeks ago and nobody noticed until the invoice came in high. A carrier sent a general rate increase (GRI) notice that got buried, so the new rate took effect before procurement ever reviewed it. And when two contracts overlap on the same lane, nobody is sure which rate is actually in force today.
The result is overpaid freight, awkward disputes with carriers, and a traffic team that can never fully trust the number on the screen.
What you'll build
A small, secure web app - just for your team - that becomes the single source of truth for contracted lane rates:
- Load your contracts from a spreadsheet or CSV (origin, destination, equipment type, rate, effective and expiry dates, fuel basis, min/max charges).
- Look up the active rate for any lane in one click, with the app picking the correct rate when contracts overlap in time.
- Get alerts by email before a rate expires and when a GRI is scheduled to take effect, so nothing slips through.
- Approve before it counts: procurement reviews any new or renewed rate, and only an approved rate becomes the rate of record. Everything else stays a draft.
- Keep a full history of every rate that was ever active, with who approved it and when.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a complete, paste-and-go runbook for an AI coding agent (Claude Code). You don't write code - you answer questions and paste prompts.
It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before a single screen is built, the plan makes the agent ask how you name your lanes, which equipment types you use, how your fuel basis works, what your peak rate-load volumes look like, who signs off on a new rate, and the messy exceptions you live with (spot vs. contract, accessorials, regional GRIs). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you, you give a thumbs-up, and then it builds a tool shaped to your actual operation - not a generic template.
From there it walks you step by step through the database, the import, the active-rate lookup, the alert engine, the approval gate, and the export - each step ending in a ready-to-copy prompt.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own rates.
- A complete audit trail - who loaded, edited, approved, or retired every rate, and when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate: the app drafts the new rate of record, a procurement reviewer approves it, and only then does it go live.
- Duplicate guards keyed on lane + carrier + effective date, so the same contract row can't be loaded twice.
Who it's for
Transportation procurement managers and traffic managers who own carrier rates and are tired of chasing them across spreadsheets and inboxes. If you can fill in a spreadsheet, you can build this.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.