Beacon Insider: June

Your freight contracts and your live shipments have always lived apart. The rate card sits in a spreadsheet, or in a PDF the carrier emailed over. The containers move through everything else. So the questions that ought to be simple never quite are. Am I being charged what I agreed? Am I about to breach my free days? How much of what I bought have I actually used?

This month we are introducing Contracts, a brand new area of Beacon that brings the two back together.

What it is

Contracts gives your contract terms a home inside Beacon, right next to your orders and shipments. Your rates, your free days, the volume you have been awarded, all of it in one place and all of it yours to update. On its own that is already tidier than a stack of spreadsheets. The real shift is what happens once the information is in. Beacon connects your terms to what is actually happening to your containers, and that is where it stops being a record and starts being useful.

Why it matters

You can see the true cost of every container before the invoices land. Because Beacon knows your rates and your free day terms, it builds the real cost of moving each box and tells you whether that number is final or still an estimate. Your cash flow becomes something you can see coming, rather than something you react to.

You can see D&D coming too. Every shipment carries a live status, so you know what is clear, what is at risk, and what is already breaching. The charges that normally turn up weeks too late to challenge become something you act on first thing in the morning.

And you can finally track plan against actual. You commit to volume the day you sign a contract. Now you can see how much of it you have used and how much is left, without waiting for someone to build the quarterly spreadsheet to find out.
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What comes next

Contracts & Rates is a substantial release on its own. It is also the foundation for the things we are most excited about. Invoice reconciliation, so Beacon checks what you are charged against what you agreed and flags anything that should not be there. Deeper D&D management, with the honest goal of getting those charges down to zero, because nobody should be paying them. And proper planning, with planned spend and capacity measured against what actually happened.

Contracts & Rates is rolling out over the next few months. Watch the walkthrough above to see it in action, and speak to your account team if you would like an early look.

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