Freight back-office automation that keeps your team in control.
TIO’s agents read inbound emails, create and update lots, match invoices, and check the document set. Your team reviews every write before it lands in the TMS you already run.
The back office is where the hours disappear.
Every pre-alert, invoice, arrival notice, and agent update arrives in the inbox first, and a person has to read it, find the job, and key the data in by hand. None of that typing is judgment work. It is matching what an email says to the field it belongs in, the same motions repeated across every shipment. At a light queue one person keeps up. Push the volume and the back office stops being a chore and becomes the ceiling on how much freight the team can move. The next hire goes to data entry instead of sales.
The prep runs in the background. The decisions stay with you.
Inbox-to-record coordination, handled
Every inbound email is read, routed to the right job, and staged for entry. Your team reviews a queue of pre-filled records instead of processing a raw inbox.
Exceptions surfaced early
Agent updates, missing documents, and booking confirmations are flagged by job and surfaced by urgency. A Friday exception does not become a Monday problem.
More jobs, same team
The coordination work runs in the background, not in the inbox, so the same team handles more volume without another hire to key data.
Your mode, your call
Run each agent human-in-the-loop, where it queues every record for your team’s approval, or autonomous, where it acts on its own. You set it per agent; customs filing always keeps a human filer.
From pre-alert to lot close, step by step.
The pre-alert arrives
An agent or carrier sends the pre-alert. The bill of lading, house bill, and packing list land in your shared inbox, often in inconsistent formats.
The agent creates the lot
It classifies the email, resolves the sender, pulls the shipment fields, and stages a new lot with each field carrying a confidence score and source text.
It binds every follow-up
Arrival notices, agent updates, and shipper questions that arrive later are tied to the correct open lot, with no manual sorting.
It matches invoices
When a carrier or vendor invoice arrives, the finance agent ties it to the job and lines the charges up against what the lot shows, so a mismatch surfaces before it gets paid.
It checks the document set
The agent compares the documents on file against what the job type requires and flags anything missing before close.
Your team reviews and approves
The operator checks the pre-filled fields and flagged exceptions, corrects anything low-confidence, and approves. Only then does the data write to the TMS.
The back office is not siloed by lane. Ocean import pre-alerts, air export bookings, domestic rate replies, and sales quotes all run through the same agents, so an operator covering more than one desk sees one queue instead of switching tools. For customs, the licensed filer of record reviews and submits exactly as before.
Straight answers.
What is freight back-office automation?
Removing the manual step between a shipment email and the finished record. Today an operator reads the pre-alert or the bills, opens the TMS, finds the job, and keys the fields by hand, about 30 minutes per lot at the US import forwarder we measured. Automation means an AI agent does that read-and-key work and a person reviews the finished draft, so the back office keeps the judgment and loses the typing.
Which parts of the back office does TIO automate?
Lot creation from the pre-alert and bills, charge lines included; ISF drafting from the worksheet; invoice matching against the job; and document checks before the lot closes. Each is a named agent doing one job. In production the measured result was lot creation in seconds instead of about 30 minutes and ISF prep in seconds instead of about 15.
What does the review step cover?
You choose per agent. In human-in-the-loop mode nothing an agent produces lands in the TMS or files with customs until a named person has reviewed and accepted it, and every extracted field carries its source text so review is a check rather than a re-type. In autonomous mode the agent acts on its own. A customs ISF is always filed by a person.
How long does it take to see the hours come back?
The first week, because there is no training project in front of the value. The agent works your real inbox from day 1, your team corrects it, and each correction becomes a rule it keeps. The forwarder running the full roster got roughly 17.5 hours a week back across lot creation, ISF prep, and the follow-up chasing.
See it run a real shipment email.
Twenty minutes, no setup. Bring a real document and watch an agent take it to a finished draft while you’re on the call.
Book a demo