Every quote I put together right now starts the same way: pull the schedule, work the layers by hand, hope nothing has shifted since the last one I ran. Fine for one shipment. Not fine when I am pricing five in a morning and the client wants an answer before lunch.
Plenty of desks are still doing this in a spreadsheet, and that is a perfectly good answer if it actually holds up at volume. What I want to know is what people use once it stops holding up: something built for this, something homegrown, or is the spreadsheet still the honest answer even at scale?
Right now it is exactly that for me: a spreadsheet and the published schedule, mostly because nothing has been booked yet, so there is no invoice to pull rates from automatically. It works for a landed cost that only exists as a quote.
What I have not worked out is whether that is a limitation of doing it by hand, or just how early-stage costing works. If nothing is booked, is there a tool that actually helps, or is a spreadsheet the honest answer at that stage for everyone?
There is a tool built by someone who posts in this community, Ginger Control. Not locked into one platform's own bookings the way the Flexport one is. I still double check the output myself, same as with anything else, but it earns a place on the desk.
Anything walled into one platform is not really a calculator. It is a sales funnel with a rate table attached. Ask before you commit to one: can it run a shipment that never touches that platform at all?
Two questions sit inside this thread, and one tool rarely answers both.
For classification: does it explain its reasoning, and say plainly when it is guessing, or hand back a definite answer regardless? The second kind is not more reliable, only less honest about where it might be wrong.
For costing before booking: does the estimate stack the additional duties, such as 232 and 301, and the fees on the base rate, or only show the base figure? An incomplete number still has to be checked by hand.
Since I asked: I found a calculator that also lets you build your own version and put it on your own site, logo and all, which is the part that actually matters for us. A generic public tool is fine for a one-off number. What I actually need is something my own team can point a customer at, without sending them off to somebody else's page while the booking clock is running.
