How to Move Freight Pricing Off Excel

It does not mean replacing one spreadsheet with a bigger one, or buying a tool and asking pricers to retype everything into it. It means the work of quoting happens in one place, from the moment a request arrives to the moment a customer says yes or goes silent.

In practice, five things move into one system:

• One rate book: contracted carrier, trucking and rail rates, plus spot rates, searchable by lane and valid dates.
• One request queue: every quote request from the shared inbox, read into the same form, with an owner and a status.
• Approvals: margins and sign-offs follow agreed rules instead of email threads.
• Quote history: what was offered, to whom, at what price and by whom, kept with the request.
• Follow-ups: every sent quote gets a date to chase it, and quotes nobody answers are closed instead of forgotten.

Excel can still be where carrier rate sheets arrive and where a manager runs a one-off analysis. It stops being the place the department runs on.

A spreadsheet and a shared mailbox work well for a small desk. They start to break when the number of pricers, lanes and requests grows, and the signs are the same in most forwarders:

• Quote requests are read by hand and retyped, and a few slip through every week.
• Contracted ocean, trucking and rail rates live in different files, and only one or two people know which copy is current.
• Margins and wording change with whoever prepared the quote.
• Nobody can say which quotes were followed up, won or lost, or why.

The tools themselves set limits. Microsoft's own guidance on co-authoring says that when two people change the same thing, the last change saved generally wins, and that one person opening the file in a version that does not support co-authoring locks it for everyone. A Microsoft 365 shared mailbox supports up to 25 users, and you cannot stop users from deleting messages in it. None of that is a flaw for a shared file or a front-desk inbox. It is a poor base for a department that prices every day.

The first step is not choosing software. Sit with the pricers and follow real quote requests from the inbox to the customer, as they happen, for a few days. Written procedures describe how quoting should work; the desk shows how it does.

Then draw the ideal version on a canvas and agree it with the people who will use it: which facts are needed before a quote can start, who approves which quotes, and what happens when a deal is won. When the pricers have shaped the process, the system feels familiar on the first day instead of being something done to them.

At AJ Worldwide we traced quote requests this way before a line of code was written. These are the questions the map has to answer:

Once the process is agreed, build and move in stages rather than all at once. The order matters because each step makes the next one safer.

Connecting the inbox does not mean a new address. Microsoft Graph, the API behind Microsoft 365 mail, can read shared mailboxes as well as personal ones, so the system reads from the address customers already use.

Keep the parallel run short and fixed. If both ways of working run for months, pricers keep the spreadsheet as the real record and the system becomes a second place to type the same thing.

Excel is a good tool; it is just the wrong home for a live pricing department. The line is simple: anything the whole team relies on every day belongs in the system, and personal analysis can stay in a spreadsheet.

Carrier rate sheets usually keep arriving as Excel files. That is fine. The difference is that they are imported into the rate book once, not copied into five personal versions.

Most failed moves fail for the same few reasons, and none of them is technical:

• Buying or building before mapping. The system copies the org chart instead of how quotes really flow.
• Designing for the manager's report instead of the pricer's day. If quoting gets slower, pricers go back to their files.
• Importing every old file. Bring in the rates that are valid now; archive the rest.
• Switching everyone overnight with no parallel run, or running in parallel with no end date.
• Letting a shadow spreadsheet live on. If one rate type stays in Excel, pricers keep two places open.
• Automating judgement. Reading a request can be automated; choosing the price and approving it should stay with people.
• Forgetting the follow-up rule. Without a date per quote and a rule for silent quotes, the new system fills with open quotes nobody chases.

It depends on how many rate sources, request channels and approval rules you have, so treat any fixed figure with care. What we can say is what happened at AJ Worldwide.

The pricing team ran on three spreadsheets and a shared inbox. It took under five months from the first build to the team quoting in the system, which it has done since May 2026. Today 14 pricers work every request in one system, every quote gets a follow-up date set by its complexity, and quotes with no answer after a month are closed as lost.

Going live was not the end. Since go-live the system has had three to four updates a week, and tenders, export contracts, rail and the sales team were added along the way. Plan for that: the first release should cover the daily quoting flow, and the rest can follow once the team works in it.

Not every pricing desk needs a system. A spreadsheet is still enough when:

• You quote a handful of jobs a month and one person does all of it.
• Rates come from one or two sources and rarely change.
• Customers do not chase quotes, and you rarely need to know why you lost one.

The move starts to pay when a second or third pricer joins, when requests get lost in the inbox, when pricing slows down because one person is on holiday, or when you cannot tell which quotes you win. At that point the spreadsheet is no longer a tool; it is the bottleneck.