Your team moves freight. TIO handles the coordination.
TIO does the back-office jobs a small forwarding team does by hand today: creating lots, booking payables, auditing finished work, and drafting customs filing data. Each action has its own setting, and a person files every customs filing.
Freight forwarders: the work, one job at a time.
Order entry
Reads the bills and the packing list and creates the lot or delivery order in your TMS, charge lines included.
- On its own
- Creates the record and sends it for review
- Goes to a person
- A party it cannot match, a document that contradicts another
- Status
- In production at a US import forwarder
Payables
Matches each line of a vendor invoice to the job’s charges and books the payable. It does not pay.
- On its own
- Books lines that match, for the vendors you have approved
- Goes to a person
- A line with no matching charge, a duplicate invoice number
- Status
- In production at a US import forwarder
Record audit
Re-checks finished records against their source documents and reports each difference with its cause.
- On its own
- Runs on a schedule and reports. It does not change a record
- Goes to a person
- Every difference waits for your team
- Status
- In production at a US import forwarder
Tracking
Follows each shipment, tells the customer when something real changes, and sends the proof of delivery.
- On its own
- Sends status and documents for a booked shipment
- Goes to a person
- A late pickup, a cancellation on or after pickup day, a date change in your TMS without your reply
- Status
- In production at a US trucking agency and a US import forwarder
Example panels with sample steps on illustrative footage. Not a live feed.
Why does growth mean more data entry, not more margin?
Every new lane and every new customer means more emails to read, more worksheets to key, more filings to get out on time. A lean team ends up spending its day moving data from the inbox into the TMS instead of moving freight. The cost curve runs straight through headcount: twice the shipments means twice the keying, which means another ops hire, recruiting and ramp included. The usual answer is to make that hire. TIO is the other answer: it takes the keying, and the team keeps the judgment.
30 min → seconds
Lot creation, per shipment, across 25+ jobs a week at a US import forwarder.
12 min → 12 sec
LTL quote reply, median, at a US trucking agency running TIO quoting.
About two days a week
Team time back, every week, from removing the keying. The full story →
What does TIO do for a forwarder?
TIO finishes a task rather than assisting with one: it starts itself when a shipment email arrives, reads the documents, matches them against your jobs, parties, and references, and produces the finished record. What happens next is set for each action. The record runs on its own inside your rules, goes to a person for review, or waits for a person’s reply. The distinction from the document tools freight has had for years is where the work stops. Extraction software hands back a screen of fields for someone to key. TIO hands back a created lot or a drafted filing. If you are evaluating vendors, we wrote up how to tell the difference before you sign.
Which jobs does TIO take?
Draft the customs filing
TIO prepares filing data from the shipping documents as a draft. A licensed person on your team reviews and files it. TIO never files, and classification advice stays with a licensed person.
Create the lot
Order entry reads the bill of lading, house bill and packing list and creates the lot in your TMS, charge lines included. It then sends a review email that shows every field. Ocean, air and domestic lots.
Quote the freight
LTL and truckload quoting prices requests and replies in the customer’s thread. It runs today at a US trucking agency, not yet at a forwarder. For a forwarder, we scope quoting first.
Audit the work
Record audit re-checks finished records against their source documents and reports each difference with its cause. Payables matches each line of a vendor invoice to the job’s charges and lists the lines that do not match. For duty, see the weekly HTS code and duty rate audit.
Start with the job that hurts most and expand as you need. Your TMS stays the system of record. Each action has its own setting: it runs on its own, goes to your team for review, or waits for your team’s reply. See what TIO does →
How does TIO compare to the next ops hire?
| Another ops hire | TIO | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to productive | Recruiting, then weeks of ramp on your conventions. | A scoped pilot on your own documents. Timing depends on your TMS and the job. Your team’s corrections become rules for your operation. |
| Cost shape | A salary that scales with volume steps. | A monthly fee per desk, a fraction of the role it does. Not per seat. |
| Peak season | Overtime, backlog, or a temp who needs training. | Lot creation takes seconds per record, so keying does not build a backlog. |
| Where judgment lives | Split between keying and deciding. | With your team. TIO preps and creates the record. Anything outside your rules goes to a person, and a person files every customs filing. |
How does the first job start?
1 · Pick the job
Order entry, payables or audit: the one that costs your team the most hours today. That job goes first, as a small paid pilot on your own documents.
2 · Run it on real shipments
TIO goes live one action at a time, when it matches your team’s work on real shipments. Your team reviews what it creates. When your team corrects it, TIO turns the correction into a rule for your operation.
3 · Expand when it has earned it
Add the next job when the first has paid for itself in hours.
Straight answers.
What does TIO actually do for a freight forwarder?
TIO does one back-office job at a time, the jobs a person does by hand today. Order entry reads the bills and creates the lot with charge lines, then sends a review email that shows every field. Payables matches vendor invoice lines to the job’s charges and books the payable. It does not pay. Record audit re-checks finished records against their source documents. LTL and truckload quoting run today at a US trucking agency, and quoting is scoped first for a forwarder. At the US import forwarder running order entry in production, lot creation went from about 30 minutes per lot to seconds.
Do we have to replace our TMS?
No. Your TMS stays the system of record. TIO works with the systems your team already runs: your TMS, spreadsheets, shared drives and email. For any other system, we first check what it lets TIO read and write. Order entry creates the lot and sends a review email that shows every field.
Does anything get filed or sent without a person?
A customs filing is never filed by TIO. TIO prepares it as a draft, and a person on your team reviews and files it. For everything else, each action has its own setting. It runs on its own inside your rules, it goes to your team for review, or it waits for a person’s reply. Anything outside your rules goes to a person with the facts attached. TMS write permissions are configured by action and customer, and the write-event journal is protected from application edits and deletion.
How big does a forwarder need to be for this to make sense?
TIO is built for small, lean teams, roughly 3 to 50 people, where the founder or ops manager still touches the inbox personally. The pricing follows the same logic: a monthly fee for each desk TIO runs, a fraction of the ops hire it replaces, not a per-seat license across the team. Start with one job, the one that costs the most hours, and expand when it has earned it.
How long until TIO is useful?
The first job starts as a scoped pilot on your own documents. What takes time is setting TIO up for your systems and your rules for the job, so timing depends on your systems and the job. TIO goes live one action at a time, when it matches your team’s work on real shipments. When your team corrects TIO, TIO turns the correction into a rule for your operation: your customers, your consignees, your conventions. TIO’s team writes each rule with you. It is a rule, not model training.
How is this different from the AI tools we already tried?
Most logistics AI stops at extraction: it parses a document and returns structured fields, and your team still does the entry, which was the expensive part. TIO finishes the job. It starts itself when the email arrives, resolves the content against your jobs and parties, does the task in the systems you already run, and sends it for review. When something does not add up, it sends the question to a person with the facts attached instead of guessing. If you want the full checklist, read our guide to evaluating logistics automation before you sign.
Where the work happens.
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