Straight answers, desk to desk.

It depends on the rate behind it. FCL quotes typically hold to the 15th or end of month; LCL to month-end; air rates 3–7 days. Carrier spot rates are far tighter — from 72 hours down to as little as 3 hours on some portals. The desk tracks the validity of every buy rate inside every quote, so you never quote on air that expired at lunch.

The desk reads the RFQ, prices it from your rate sources, drafts the reply, and flags risk (margin floor, surcharge gaps, customer history). Your team approves every send — acceptance and the send itself never leave supervised mode. Drafting can be dialled to auto once you trust it; the gate cannot.

Email threads, PDFs, Excel and CSV attachments, WhatsApp messages and forwarded images of documents. Multi-line RFQs parse into structured shipment lines — commodity, weight, dims, incoterm, requested validity — for your coordinator to verify, not re-key.

Yes. The desk runs alongside CargoWise, Logi-Sys, Kale, Shipsy, Magaya — or no TMS at all. Forwarders on Excel and Tally are a core segment: there is nothing to rip out, and the one process that hurts most is the first to go live.

First quote out under supervised approval inside 14 days. We scope your rate sources, configure margin logic and floors, and your team starts approving real quotes in week two.

Your rates stay yours. The desk prices from your contracts, your portal accounts, and your history — it does not pool, resell, or benchmark your rates against other forwarders'.

A spot rate is what a carrier will charge you for the leg. A quote is what you offer your customer: legs assembled, surcharges complete, margin applied, validity stated. Carriers have automated the first. AI Quote Desk automates the second — the part that wins or loses the shipment.

Industry benchmarks put forwarder gross margins at 10–20% of revenue and net margins near 3–4%. Which is exactly why quoting errors hurt: a missed surcharge on a thin-margin shipment can erase the profit of the next three.