Freight rates

Your freight master is the Excel workbook where your team keeps the freight rates you’ve agreed with carriers: lanes, ocean freight, surcharges and free time. Keeping it current means reading every rate sheet, email and notice carriers send and retyping the changes. With Freight Rates, you hand those sources to Mercora. It reads them, compares them with your freight master, and proposes the exact cell changes. Nothing is written to the workbook until someone confirms.

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Before you start: connect the freight master

Freight Rates needs a freight master workbook in SharePoint. Without one there is no freight workflow: Mercora tells you to connect it instead. A workspace admin connects it once: The freight master is protected: the Copilot’s and automations’ ordinary file actions can’t change it, whoever asks. It changes only through the Freight Rates review described here.

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Send Mercora a freight source

A source can be a rate sheet, a carrier’s email, a surcharge or free-time notice: Excel, CSV, PDF, Word or plain text. There are three ways in. Every source from Upload or Email becomes one freight item in the Inbox. Preparing the proposal takes a few minutes.

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Review the proposed changes

Open the freight item in the Inbox. It shows the source, and the plan: for each lane (for example Laem Chabang → Singapore), the cells Mercora wants to change, such as ocean freight or a surcharge, from the current value to the new one. Before confirming, you can correct the plan in place: skip a lane, type your own value, or take a column Mercora held back. Mercora flags any lane where the carrier’s printed all-in rate doesn’t add up from freight plus surcharges, so you can check it. Then:

• Confirm writes your reviewed plan to the workbook, with your corrections.
• Reject drops the plan. Nothing is written. (Dismiss when there is no plan.)
• Ask Copilot opens a chat about the item, for example to have the plan reworked. Confirm or reset your corrections first; they live only on the card.

If the master already says what the source says, or nothing in the source can be applied, the item reads Nothing to apply and nothing is written.

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What happens after Confirm

Mercora writes to the sheet in the background. Before writing, it checks that the cells still hold what the plan expected; after writing, it reads every cell back. Prepare again starts from the plan you confirmed, so your corrections are kept, and the new plan comes back for review in a few minutes.

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Changes from the Copilot

When you ask the Copilot for a freight change on Home, it prepares the same kind of plan and shows it on a card in the chat. Approve writes it; Reject drops it. As with every Copilot change, nothing is written until you approve. See Copilot. You can also ask the Copilot freight questions, such as “Which freight rates expire this month?” or “Which forwarders have quoted us rates?”.

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House rules

House rules are your workspace’s own decisions about the freight master, such as how a port is written. Mercora follows them on every Copilot request, upload and email, ahead of its general rules. You add a house rule by telling the Copilot, which proposes it on a card for your approval. Settings → Freight house rules lists them as Active or Retired; retire one there when Mercora should no longer follow it.

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Who can do what

Your role needs the Freight Rates permission: view to see freight items, edit to upload rate sheets and confirm changes. See Roles and permissions. If the Freight Rates module is turned off, the freight workflow stops and freight items are hidden from the Inbox.

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Next steps