Freight forwarding software is the software in which a freight forwarder plans and runs shipments for exporters and importers: it books space on ships and aircraft, prepares the documents and follows each container to the buyer. A freight forwarder is a company that arranges the whole journey of goods for the owner of the goods. It does not usually own ships. Instead, it buys space from shipping lines and airlines and sells the full service to its customer, as the page on freight brokers and forwarders explains.
Take, for example, a hand-tool maker in Rajkot that sells 18 tonnes of spanners to a buyer in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The exporter asks a forwarder for a price. An employee in the forwarder's pricing team enters the route, from Mundra port to Jebel Ali port, and the container size, 20 feet. The software shows the rates that three shipping lines have offered for that route this month, and the cost of the truck to Mundra. The employee adds the forwarder's margin and sends a quote of ₹1.1 lakh. The exporter accepts.
The software then runs the job. It books a container on a ship that sails in six days. It arranges a truck to bring the empty container to the factory and the full container to the port. It prepares the papers: the commercial invoice, the packing list and the bill of lading, the receipt for the goods. It sends the shipment details to the customs broker's customs clearance software, so that the shipping bill, India's export declaration, is filed without typing the same details again. It checks with the port's terminal operating system that the container has arrived and been loaded. If the buyer pays through a letter of credit, a bank's promise to pay against the right documents, the forwarder sends the bill of lading to the exporter's bank through a trade finance platform.
Larger forwarders handle thousands of such jobs a month. So the software also keeps the accounts for each job: what the forwarder paid the shipping line, the truck company and the port, and what it billed the customer. The difference is the forwarder's earning on the job.
Two parts sit inside many forwarding systems. Purchase order management follows an importer's orders line by line. The electronic bill of lading replaces the paper original. Some newer companies, called digital freight forwarders, sell the whole service mainly through their own software, with online quotes and booking.
How is a forwarder different from a digital freight marketplace? A marketplace finds one truck for one load within a country. A forwarder takes charge of the whole journey, across borders, by road, sea or air.