Creating a carrier should be one of the first steps before you start using the tms along with your other fleet. As without it you wouldn't be able to perform any functionalities of the software. You can create one or multiple carriers in the loadstop platform at a time.
In order to create a “Carrier” within Load stop platform, you would have to navigate to the hamburger icon on the top left corner, once you “click on it” and a side menu would appear. Under the menu you would have to look for “Fleet” and “click on the first sub category” i.e. “Carrier”.
In order to create a carrier “click on create new carrier” button on the top right hand side.
Once you click on this button, a pop up page would appear on which all the settings pertaining to the carrier would have to be configured.
The first important information to fill out is the “service type”. Here you will see three options in the drop down namely “carrier”, “dispatch” and “broker service”, provided you have the add on. Upon selecting "carrier" for service type, another option with the title “authority type” would appear. Herein you can select whether your carrier would be “managed authority” or “external carrier”. “Managed authority” would be your own business that you own and comprehensively manage. “External authority” on the other hand would be an authority for which you source or broker loads.
Your other options would be “dispatch” or “broker service”. Dispatch service would only let you do “sourcing”, this would be auto configured as soon as you select dispatch service. Similarly “broker” option would turn on the factoring option under carrier configuration automatically. However the percentage for the factoring would have to be added, this is important because it affects your invoices module.
As soon as you select the authority type, be it managed authority or external, this will auto configure all your “Carrier configuration” toggles.
Once these settings are selected, then your carrier details would come in. Here you would have to add your MC number, DOT number, Federal Tax ID, Status of the carrier and whether you’d like to track 1099.
Your carrier’s contact information would have to be filed out under contact info. Anything in the asterisk would have to be compulsorily added.
Right under your contact information would be your carrier configuration settings that would auto configure as soon as you select “Managed authority” and disappear if you select the carrier as an “external authority”. Even as a “managed authority” you can customize and personalize your carrier settings by turning off the toggles that you wouldn’t want or the areas that you wouldn't manage.
However if you do factoring then you can enable the “Use Factoring” toggle and this will further ask you the percentage of the factoring that your company does.
Upon scrolling down, you would get the option to add your primary insurance liability. The details that you can add are the name of the company, policy number, expiration date, liability number and any notes. It is noteworthy to point out that none of the information is mandatory or required.
Then comes your cargo liability information, you can add the company’s information such as name, phone, agent, agent phone number, email, policy number, expiration, limit and notes. Again, none of this information is mandatory to add.
The other carrier details include General liability of the carrier, factoring payable to, invoice payable to, remit and dispatch details. This is all available but none of this information is required to be added.
Once all the information is added you can hit save on the bottom right of the page and thus a carrier would be created.
As soon as you hit “save” a pop up page of with the same information would appear, however this time with more tabs for the information such as “documents”, “expense”, “logo” and billing "SMTP". These are all the details relating to the carrier you just created.
By clicking of the documents tab, you would be able to add all the documents that are relating to the carrier you just created. Either you can choose to create one or you can add from the list that shows up on the right hand side by clicking on the plus sign. Here you should be able upload your document through uploading the file from your computer. Once you are creating the document, you would have the option to add the expiration date. The date you add will help you manage compliance. It is recommended that you add the expiration date as well as it affects the compliance module.
You should be able to add all the expenses pertaining to the carrier you created and these expenses would be configurable under your setup first.
For the carrier’s logo you can add an image, however it has to be less than 30k. The reason for the small image being that it would be used on the invoices of the company. If you to use one logo for multiple carriers then you can add one in appearance tab of settings and this would be used for all.
You can simply upload the file and click on the “upload” option in the bottom to complete the upload.
Finally under “Billing Email SMTP, you can set your carrier specific email that would be used for invoicing. The details that are required are the sender’s email address, sender’s display name which can be either the business’s name or the user’s name. SMTP host is accessible through the email provider or you can google search easily and the most common SMTP port would be 587.
Here are some of the most common SMTP Hosts:
For gmail, it is smtp.gmail.com
for office 365, it is smtp.office365.com
and lastly for yahoo you can add smtp.mail.yahoo
Further information required would be the user name and the password of the Loadstop account and the test email would have to be entered. Once all these settings are configured, a test email can be sent to see if it gets through. If you receive the email then it means that the email settings have been configured successfully.
The carrier’s page would have the tabs under which the different carriers would be organized.
The action button would allow you to delete, edit, and view history of the carrier. By editing you can always change the settings of the carrier and the viewing would only allow you to view carrier settings. You can delete a carrier through delete and view logs through the history option.
