Freight Rate Variance Dashboard
Aggregate paid freight against your contract or benchmark rate by lane, rank the worst variances, and let procurement approve a renegotiation action list before it publishes.
A login-protected dashboard that ranks lanes by volume-weighted overspend versus your benchmark, with a human-approved renegotiation queue and a full audit trail.
Before you start
- A free Supabase account
- A free Vercel account
- A free Resend account
- A CSV of paid freight by lane (or a Google Sheet you can export)
- A CSV of your contract or benchmark rates by lane
The problem this kills
You are almost certainly overpaying on freight, and you can feel it in the monthly invoices, but you cannot point at the exact lanes. The data lives in three places at once: paid freight in your TMS or accounting export, your negotiated contract rates in a spreadsheet a carrier rep emailed you last quarter, and the "what should this cost" benchmark in someone's head. Nobody has time to reconcile them line by line, so renegotiation conversations happen on gut feel instead of dollars.
The result is predictable. A handful of lanes quietly drift 20-40% above contract because of accessorials, fuel surcharges, or a carrier that stopped honoring the rate. They never get flagged because they are buried under thousands of correctly-priced shipments. By the time finance notices the run rate, you have lost a full quarter of leverage.
What you'll build
A web dashboard that ingests your paid-freight file and your benchmark rate table, normalizes both to a common lane definition (for example origin and destination 3-digit zip), and computes the variance for every lane: paid versus benchmark, in dollars and percent, weighted by shipment volume so the biggest bleeders rise to the top. Procurement sees a ranked worst-offenders list, reviews each candidate, and approves which lanes go into the renegotiation queue. Only approved lanes publish to the action list that the team works from.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan opens by interviewing you about your business so the tool is built around your actual freight data, not a generic template. It asks how you define a lane, what your paid-freight export looks like, where your benchmark rates come from, your typical and peak shipment volumes, and the messy edge cases (multi-stop loads, accessorials, mode mixing). It reads back a short spec, you confirm it, and only then does it build.
From there it walks you step by step through standing up the database, the secure import for both files, the lane-normalization and volume-weighted variance engine, the ranked dashboard, the procurement approval gate, the renegotiation queue, and the email notifications. Every step ends with a ready-to-paste 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 freight data.
- A human-in-the-loop approval gate: the tool ranks and drafts the renegotiation list, but a person reviews and approves each lane before it publishes. Nothing reaches the action list automatically.
- A complete audit trail: who imported what, who approved which lanes, and when.
- Duplicate guards: the same shipment cannot be counted twice (dedupe key = shipment ID), so your variance numbers stay honest across re-imports.
Who it's for
Transportation procurement and logistics finance teams who want to walk into carrier renegotiations with a dollar-ranked, defensible list of the worst lanes instead of a hunch.
You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.