Puplify / ChatGPT for haulage and trucking firms

ChatGPT for haulage and trucking firms

You run trucks, or you broker the loads, or both. The rate requests come in by email at nine at night. The shipper wants a number by Friday, the lane is new, and the only place the real cost sits is in your head and three tabs of a spreadsheet.

Most owners we build for have five to fifty people, an accounting package, a TMS or a fuel card portal, and a lot of email. ChatGPT is already open in a tab. The problem is that a blank chat box gives you a blank answer, so you retype the same background about your lanes and your surcharge table every time.

A Puplify skill is the missing half. You paste the rate request, the cost per mile you run at and the terms you give. The skill asks for what is missing, marks what it does not know, and hands back the brief, the costed quote, the chase sequence or the cash flow. You read it, correct it, send it.

The jobs a skill takes over

• Turn a rate request into a clear briefIn the $149 pack

  A shipper emails about a new lane: two cities, a rough volume, no appointment detail. The skill reads the thread and separates what is agreed from what was only mentioned, then lists the questions to ask before you price anything. Loading hours, pallet counts, tarping, driver assist, detention terms.

• Price a lane or a contract runIn the $149 pack

  Give it your cost per mile, deadhead, tolls, driver pay, your current fuel surcharge table and the lane miles. You get an internal costed estimate and a separate customer quote, with the margin on the internal copy, the surcharge basis stated, and the exclusions written out instead of assumed.

• Follow up a quoted lane that went quietIn the $149 pack

  The traffic manager said they were reviewing it and that was two weeks ago. The skill writes the follow-up messages that give them a reason to reply, a capacity date, a rate valid-until, a question about the loading window, instead of another note asking if they saw your email.

• Price a change on a load in progressIn the $149 pack

  An extra stop, four hours of waiting, a re-delivery after a refused pallet. The skill tells you whether that sits inside the rate you already accepted or is genuinely extra, prices it from your real hourly and per-mile costs, and drafts the approval note for the shipper before the driver moves.

• Chase freight invoices with the POD in handIn the $149 pack

  Net-30 has passed and the payables team says they never received the paperwork. Paste the ledger line and the POD reference and you get the sequence, polite first, firm later, each message attaching the proof of delivery and the rate confirmation, plus the point where you stop asking and act.

• See the tight weeks before they arriveIn the library

  Fuel goes out weekly, payroll every two weeks, the insurance renewal and the truck payments land on their own dates, and your shippers pay on their own schedule. The skill builds a thirteen-week view from your figures so you can see which week is short while there is still time to do something about it.

• Answer a shipper's scorecardIn the library

  A quarterly carrier scorecard arrives with an on-time number you do not recognize and a tender acceptance figure that ignores the loads they cancelled. The skill helps you own the real misses, dispute the wrong numbers with your own dates and POD times, and reply in a way that keeps you on the routing guide.

Illustration: an eight-truck regional haulier quotes a new contract lane

An illustration with a fictional firm and made-up figures, not a customer result.

This is a made-up example, written to show the shape of the work. The numbers are illustrative, not a result anyone achieved.

A food distributor asks an eight-truck haulier to cover a new lane, five round trips a week, 620 loaded miles out and a light backhaul. The owner has been quoting lanes for nineteen years, but the cost detail lives in a spreadsheet he built in 2019 and the request came in with half the detail missing.

He pastes the shipper's email into the job brief skill. It comes back with the agreed facts, the assumptions he is about to make by accident, and eight questions: appointment windows, dwell at the DC, pallet exchange, lumper fees, who pays detention after two hours, and the surcharge review interval. He sends them, gets answers, then runs the quote skill with his cost per mile of $2.14, driver pay, deadhead on the backhaul leg, tolls and a fuel surcharge pegged to the weekly national diesel average.

The internal sheet shows the lane at $2,860 per round trip holding a margin he can live with, and flags two unknowns: the backhaul rate is a guess and the detention exposure is unpriced. The customer quote states the surcharge basis, the free time and the waiting rate. He adjusts the backhaul number himself, because he knows that market and the skill does not.

What he still checks: every cost figure against the fuel card and payroll actuals, the insurance position on the commodity, driver hours across the week, and the credit terms before he commits a truck to a 52-week run.

Questions hauliers ask