Road Freight TMS (Coimbatore)

The problem

The operator is a real-world Indian logistics business — trucks on the road every day moving goods between cities. The business was growing, but it was being run on three things: Excel, WhatsApp, and willpower.

• Lorry Receipts (the legal document that travels with every truck) were being copied from a template every single time. The same customer's address re-typed for the hundredth time. Mistakes were inevitable.
• Customer details lived in one Excel file. Vendor (truck owner) details in another. Bank details for paying vendors? Usually buried in a WhatsApp message.
• Freight rates were re-negotiated every booking because nobody had a single rate card. "How much do we charge to move a 20-foot container from Coimbatore to Chennai?" — the answer depended on who you asked.
• Generating a tax invoice meant manually pulling together 5 or 10 Lorry Receipts, calculating GST on a calculator, formatting it in Word to look compliant, and emailing the PDF. One invoice could take an hour.
• Paying vendors meant tracking advances and balances in yet another spreadsheet, with bank transfer references (UTRs) flying around in screenshots.
• Reports for the owner — billed vs unbilled, profitability, who's late on payment — were a quarterly exercise that took two full days.

And on top of all this, they had just launched a separate vendor-bidding app where truck owners could bid for shipments. But the bidding app and the office system didn't know about each other. Every vendor existed twice. Every winning bid had to be re-typed into the office system. Every payment reference had to be copied across.

The owner's brief was simple: "Give me one system that runs my entire freight operation. And make sure it talks to the bidding app so my team isn't entering the same data twice."

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The approach

We treated this as two problems sitting inside the same business:

1. Replace the Excel-and-paperwork chaos with a single, clean office system
2. Make that system talk to the vendor bidding app so data flows automatically — no double-entry, no mistakes

The temptation in a project like this is to build the office system first, then "integrate later." We've seen that go wrong too many times. Instead, we sat down with the owner on day one and mapped out which information should live in only one place — vendors, locations, customers, trip prices, payment references — and built both systems on top of that single source of truth.

That one decision is what makes the whole thing feel magical. When a truck owner wins a bid in the vendor bidding app and finishes the trip, the Lorry Receipt in the office system gets created with everything already filled in: the right vendor, the right route, the right price, the advance payment reference, the balance payment reference. The operations team doesn't type it. It's just there.

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What we built

A clean home for all the master data

• Customer master: Every customer in one place, with separate shipping and billing addresses, GSTIN, contact details. No more digging through old emails to find an address.
• Vendor master: Every truck owner with bank details, tax info (TDS applicable or not), KYC documents uploaded directly to their profile, and an approval flow before a new vendor can be paid.
• Location master: Cities, states, pincodes — all standardised. Used by both the office system and the bidding app.
• Freight rate card: A proper rate book — what we charge each customer (or pay each vendor) for each route, broken down by 25 different truck types from a small Tata Ace pickup to a 32-foot trailer.

The Lorry Receipt workflow — the heart of the operation

• Create a Lorry Receipt manually OR pull a completed trip from the bidding app and turn it into an LR with one click
• Draft and finalised states so a half-filled LR can be saved and finished later
• Soft-delete with a Trash bin and Restore — because in logistics, "wait, undelete that" happens daily
• Upload proof-of-delivery photos directly to the trip
• A "trips that need billing" queue that pulls from the bidding app — so the team never forgets to bill a delivered trip

Billing — the part the commercial team lives in

• Generate one invoice across multiple Lorry Receipts for the same customer
• GST and transportation charges broken out cleanly
• Due date and "paid/unpaid" tracking
• The actual PDF that comes out is tax-invoice grade — full GTA declaration, all the line items, all the legal bits an auditor wants. It looks identical to a manually formatted invoice, except it takes 10 seconds instead of an hour.

Paying the vendors

• Per-trip payment vouchers covering both advance and balance payments
• Automatic TDS calculation when applicable
• Bank transaction references tracked end-to-end (entered in the bidding app, flow into the office system, end up in the voucher)
• Voucher PDFs ready to send

Reports the owner actually asked for

9 different exports, all to Excel, all on demand:

• Billed Lorry Receipts
• Unbilled Lorry Receipts
• Profitability
• Outstanding advances and balances
• Fleet master
• Customer master
• Vendor master
• Lorry Receipt report
• POD report
• Ageing report (who owes us money, and how long has it been)

The owner used to wait for these. Now he runs them himself in the morning.

The dashboard

Open it and see: today's revenue, today's cost, today's profit, profit margin %, trip count. Plus the top vendors, top routes, and top customers ranked by how much money they're making the business. Date-range filters so the owner can see "this week", "this month", "last quarter" instantly.

Three roles, three views

• Admin — full access, configures everything
• Operations executive — adds and edits trips, can't touch billing or finance
• Commercial executive — handles billing and payments, can't change master data

Everyone sees what they need and nothing they don't.

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The hard part — and how we solved it

The interesting part of this project wasn't any single feature. It was making two separate apps feel like one business.

Here's the trap most agencies fall into: build the office system, build the bidding app, then write some "integration" later that copies data between them. It always breaks. Vendors get duplicated. Prices drift. Payment references get lost. The owner ends up with two systems that disagree with each other and a team that doesn't trust either.

We made one decision early that prevented all of this: the data lives in one place, and both apps look at that same place.

In practice, that means:

• A vendor signs up once in the bidding app. The office team sees them immediately — no re-entry.
• A location is created once in the office system. The bidding app uses the same location for new shipment posts.
• The same admin login works for both apps.
• When a vendor wins a bid for ₹23,000, that price is stored once. The Lorry Receipt picks it up automatically. The payment voucher picks it up automatically. Nobody types ₹23,000 anywhere except the vendor when they bid.
• When the bank transfer is made and the reference number is entered in the bidding app, it shows up in the office system instantly. The office team doesn't have to ask.

The result: the same vendor exists once. The winning price is typed once. The bank reference is typed once. Everything else flows. The owner went from "I run my logistics business through WhatsApp and Excel" to "I have a system."

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The outcome

• Live in production at the road freight operator, running the company's daily operations
• Replaced an Excel-and-WhatsApp workflow with a single clean web app handling masters, Lorry Receipts, billing, payments, and reports
• Zero double-entry between the office system and the bidding app — vendor data, locations, trip prices, and payment references all flow automatically
• Tax-invoice-grade PDFs straight out of the system — auditor-ready, no manual formatting
• 9 reports the owner now runs himself in the morning instead of waiting two days a quarter
• Three roles so each team sees exactly what they need
• The owner's actual quote: he stopped checking WhatsApp for vendor bank details

The deeper win: a real business that was running on willpower now runs on a system. That's the t3c.ai pitch in one sentence.