In this article we will go over the Rate Zones, which define the Freight costs that are applied on your orders - Sales or Transport. The first section relates to how to set up your Rates within Control Tower. If you are looking for how to upload Rates via Excel, please refer to this article. Secondly, we will go over how Rates can be applied on your orders either manually or automatically.

To create a new Rate Zone you should navigate to Admin > Cost Management > Rate Zones. Creating a new Rate Zone takes place across 5 different tabs - Basics, Rates, Validity, Lanes and Lines, so let's go through them one by one:

In the Basics tab you can specify to what order set-up should the Rate be applied to. For example in the below set up our Rate would only be applied if the carrier is Test Carrier, the Service Level is Standard and the Transport Mode is ROAD. If an order has any of these values differing, the Rate will not be selected as a candidate.

Remember that in case you have multiple candidate rates on an order, the more specified Rates settings have a priority over the less specified settings.

By selecting a Source Zone, you can use another Rate Zone and increase or decrease the price by percentage using Price Adjustment. For example, through this option, you can 'use' a different Rate Zone, but adjust the price for a specific carrier, or for orders with Hazardous goods.

Origin and Destination Regions can be used as an alternative to Lanes tab. The regions can be selected from the Rate regions table. This rate would then only be applied to orders originating from or having destination within the defined regions.

In the Rates tab you can define how will the rate be calculated. There are multiple ways to calculate a Rate, as you can see below.

For each of the options some fields may become available so you can further specify how the Rate should be applied, for example by which unit?

Extra Stop Cost defines an additional cost added to the Rate for each stop (for example Routing) added to the route between the Origin and Destination.

Here you can define when should the Rate be applied to the order. In the example below, the Rate would only be applied to orders created between 9th of March and 30th of April, but only when this order falls within the Office Hours of both locations or on Saturday.

Expiration Warning can also be defined to trigger an Alert X days before the Rate expires (this has to be defined further in Configurable Alerts).

In Lanes you can define the specific Origin and Destination country and postcodes for which should the Rate apply. You can use a general setting such as BE - BE, as in an example below. This would apply to all the orders with Locations of Origin and Destination within Belgium.

You can narrow down the setting by adding a postal code behind the country code, for example BE2000-BE2020 would be Antwerp and BE1000-BE1030, Brussels. This Rate would then only apply to orders originating in Antwerp and ending in Brussels.

Alternatively, you can define a Route (selected from Route masterdata), which is just a simple 'mock-up' field which you can assign on an order and that way link the relevant Rate Zone.

Transit relates to 'Transit Time' which can be used for automatic Schedule Calculation. By default the value would be in minutes, however upon enabling the Transit Times in Days checkbox, the value is calculated in days. Excluding days would prevent the Transit Time from being calculated on the selected days.

In this section you can define your actual rates per unit chosen in the Rates tab. You can add multiple lines specifying different price per unit depending on the range. In the example below, we use price per kilogram. This means that for transports of total load between 1 and 99 kilograms, each kilogram would be charged 4 EUR. If our load would contain, for example 300kg, the unit rate of 3.5 EUR (your selected currency) would apply resulting in a Freight rate of 1050 EUR. You can also, additionally, define a Flat Rate per each Line.

Unit rounding refers to how the Unit value should be rounded. For example if we would select 1, the value 58,8 would become 59, if we would select 10, it would become 60 and so on.