In short: Spreadsheets and templates, rate-management tools and email-based AI drafting: what each is good at, where it breaks, and how to choose.
Plenty of small forwarders run CargoWise for jobs, documents and declarations, but do most of their quoting somewhere else: in the inbox, in a spreadsheet, in someone's head. That's not a failure of discipline. Quoting happens before a job exists, it's fast and messy, and it often involves a customer who will never book. This is an honest look at the ways small teams handle quoting alongside or outside CargoWise, what each one is good at, and when it stops working.
A quote request arrives as an email with a commercial invoice attached, or as three lines from a customer's phone. To answer it you need to read it, work out what's missing, look up rates, add local charges and clearance, and reply. If creating a job or a quote record in your operating system takes longer than writing the email, people write the email.
Cost now adds a second reason. Since 1 December 2025 CargoWise has been priced through Value Packs, which carry "an all-in-one transaction fee per logistics job", with a job being, for example, a shipment or a stand-alone customs declaration (WiseTech Global announcement, republished by the Freight & Trade Alliance). Whatever that means for your own invoice, it's a good moment to be clear about which work happens in the system and which happens around it. Our summary of the pricing change has the detail.
None of the options below replace CargoWise. They sit in front of it. The job still gets created there once the customer says yes.
This is where most small forwarders start, and for many it's where they should stay for a while. A rate sheet in a spreadsheet, a quote calculator tab that adds origin, freight, destination, clearance and delivery, and a reply template in your email client.
Where it fits: a team of one to five people, a handful of regular lanes, rates that change monthly rather than weekly, and quote volumes where the owner can still see every reply.
What it does well: it costs nothing extra, everyone already knows how to use it, and you control every line. A well-built sheet with one tab per mode, a local charges tab and a door delivery zone tab is genuinely quick to quote from. Our guide to structuring a freight rate sheet covers the layout.
Where it breaks: versions multiply, someone quotes from last month's file, and the calculator only works for the person who built it. The bigger problem is that the spreadsheet only helps with the arithmetic. Reading the request, spotting the missing details and writing the reply are still manual, and those are usually where the minutes go.
This category covers software built to store contract and spot rates, apply surcharges and margins, and generate quotes, often with a customer-facing portal or a quote PDF. Some are standalone, some come as modules of a larger freight platform, and some connect to carrier or NVOCC rate feeds.
Where it fits: forwarders with many lanes, frequent rate changes, several people quoting, and a need for consistent margins and approval rules. If you're loading new ocean rates every fortnight and managing surcharges across dozens of origins, a dedicated tool earns its keep.
What it does well: one source of truth for rates, version control, margin rules applied the same way every time, and reporting on win rates by lane or customer.
Where it breaks for small teams: setup. Someone has to load and maintain the rates in the tool's format, and that someone is usually already busy. There's also a training cost, and the tool usually expects the request to be typed into a form. If your requests arrive as free-text emails and attachments, a person still has to read them and key them in before the tool can help.
When you assess one, ask how rates get in, how long it takes to load your current sheet, whether it handles your local and destination charges as well as the freight, and what happens to your data if you leave.
The newest category works from the email itself. A quote request is forwarded to, or read from, a mailbox. Software reads the email and attachments, pulls out the origin, destination, mode, cargo details and Incoterm, prices it from your rate sheet, and returns a draft reply for a person to check and send.
Where it fits: small teams whose bottleneck is reading and replying, not storing rates. If your requests are mostly unstructured emails and your rates already live in a spreadsheet, this approach targets the slow part without asking you to change systems.
What it does well: it handles the reading, the missing-detail questions and the assembly of the reply, which are the steps a spreadsheet can't do. Setup is usually your existing rate sheet rather than a data migration. Nothing changes in CargoWise, and leaving is as simple as no longer forwarding emails.
Where to be careful: a draft is only as good as the rates behind it, and language models can misread a request or invent a number if the system isn't built to prevent it. Look for tools that show which rate-sheet row each line came from, flag what they couldn't find instead of guessing, and never send anything to your customer without a person approving it. Ask where your emails and rates are stored and who can see them.
Whichever you pick, measure it the same way: time from request received to complete quote sent, and the share of quotes that go out without a follow-up question. If a change doesn't move those two numbers within a month, it isn't the right change.
Laneworks publishes its test: 22 messy quote requests (port codes, EXW pickups, air volumetric weight, LCL weight-or-measure, reefer, dangerous goods, spreadsheet and PDF attachments) run against a rate sheet you can download, with every total recalculated by hand. Whichever quoting tool you choose, ask for the same on your own requests. Laneworks will run 20 of yours against your rate sheet, free, and send back the scored workbook. See the benchmark
Booking, documents, the customs declaration, billing and your operational record. Quoting outside CargoWise works when the handover is clean: the accepted quote carries everything needed to create the job, in the same structure every time, so whoever keys it in isn't re-reading a thread of six emails.
For how email-based drafting works in practice, see Laneworks freight quoting software.
Laneworks is an email-based drafting tool. It prices quote requests from your rate sheet, shows the rate row behind every number, and never contacts your customer. There's a full sample draft on the site. To try it on your own work, forward a real quote request to try@getlaneworks.com and a draft comes back in about two minutes.
Forward a quote request