Catupult Forward
Enquiry to invoice.
One workspace that does the work.
Ocean FCL, LCL and air. Quotes, bookings, documents, tracking and invoices in one place, with Cathy, CatuDoc and CatuPilot doing the typing, chasing and checking in between.
Live in minutes, no implementation project.
The problem
How many times does your team type the same shipment?
A request arrives by email, WhatsApp or phone. The details go into a quote. The quote becomes an order. The booking details are entered again. Documents are checked somewhere else. Vendor costs are matched later. The invoice and the job's margin are pulled together after the container has already sailed.
Nothing in that sequence is difficult. All of it is typing something that is already written down somewhere else.
The same twelve fields, keyed again into the next system.
Enquiry to invoice
The shipment gets built once.
Everything downstream inherits it. Nobody rebuilds the shipment at the next step, because the next step already has it.
- 01 The enquiry
A customer asks about four lanes. Four enquiries exist before you've finished reading the email.
Requests arrive by email, message or phone and come out as structured shipment requirements, with the customer context already attached.
You Best rate Nhava Sheva → Rotterdam, 1 × 40HC, ready 14 Oct?CathyCreated the enquiry. Three live contracts on the lane — all-in, checked against the ready date.
Create QuoteRate comparisonNhava Sheva (JNPT) → Rotterdam Maersk PreferredUSD 2,203.74 / 40HC CMA CGMUSD 2,386.01 / 40HC Hapag-LloydUSD 2,115.50 / 40HCCreate a quotation for any of these, or ask for more detail?
- 02 The rate
Every carrier's all-in price for the lane, on one screen.
Contract rates, spot rates and surcharges — BAF, CAF, LSS, ISPS, THC, OCC — compared side by side with schedules and validity. No rate on the lane? Procurement knows immediately, and the enquiry waits for the number instead of sitting in someone’s head.
Rate comparisonNhava Sheva (JNPT) → RotterdamCardsTable Create Quote MaerskUSD 2,203.74 / 40HCDeparts17 Oct (Sat)Arrives18 Nov (Wed)Transit32 days · DirectOcean freight1,788.20Local charges415.54All-in totalUSD 2,203.74Valid through 31 Dec CMA CGMUSD 2,386.01 / 40HCDeparts15 Oct (Thu)Arrives6 Nov (Fri)Transit22 days · DirectOcean freight1,945.30Local charges440.71All-in totalUSD 2,386.01Valid through 31 Dec Hapag-LloydUSD 2,115.50 / 40HCDeparts17 Oct (Sat)Arrives18 Nov (Wed)Transit33 days · DirectOcean freight1,658.40Local charges457.10All-in totalUSD 2,115.50Valid through 31 Dec - 03 The quote
Every quote comes out at your price — whoever builds it.
Margin rules set at every level you actually work at: global, branch, customer, trade lane, down to one customer on one lane. The most specific rule wins. A floor nothing can be quoted below. Your nominated carrier steered in where you want the volume.
Your pricing policy stops living in the head of whoever’s been there longest. A new hire’s first quote comes out at the same margin as your best salesperson’s.
And every quote is priced from a recorded rate selection, so it can still be explained months later — even after the rate book has moved.
One charge line is below your 5.0% margin floorCharge Basis Sell Buy Margin % Ocean Freight All-InOFR Per container 1,788.20 1,625.00 163.20 9.1% Destination DeliveryDDC Per container 213.84 194.40 19.44 9.1% Documentation FeeODF Per B/L 58.56 53.24 5.32 9.1% Export ServiceEXP Per container 19.52 18.90 0.62 3.2% Total 2,080.12 1,891.54 188.58 9.1% - 04 The job
Booking confirmed, job open.
A won quote becomes a customer order, a booking and a job without re-keying. Drop in the carrier’s confirmation PDF and the vessel, voyage, ETD, cut-offs and container numbers land in the job on their own.
CarrierMaerskVesselAlula ExpressVoyage642WEquipment1 × 40HCETD17 OctETA18 NovTransit32 daysOrderCO-26-000002Cut-offsVGM14 Oct 17:00Shipping instruction14 Oct 12:00Gate-in15 Oct 16:00in 2 days - 05 The documents
Read once, never retyped.
Booking confirmations, vendor invoices, shipping instructions, rate contracts and KYC documents — extracted, checked against the booking and filed against the shipment. SI, HBL, AWB and invoices generate from the job on your own letterhead.
Shipping Instruction SI-2026-000118ReadBooking Confirmation BC-2026-000091ReadHouse Bill of Lading HBL-2026-000044DraftVendor Invoice INV-88412.pdfMatchedCommercial Invoice CI-2026-000044IssuedMaster Bill of Lading MBL-88412.pdfReleased - 06 The container
The delay reaches you before your customer's email does.
Container tracking across carriers in one view, with exceptions surfaced rather than discovered.
ContainerPCUU 784190-2Type40HC · 2 TEUGross weight18,000 kgSealM091-2774Where is the box on J-26-000116?StatusDeliveredLast eventEmpty return, 6 Oct 09:00 UTCLocationRotterdamThe container completed its voyage and is in empty return at Rotterdam.
- 07 The money
The margin was known at booking.
Vendor invoices land costed with every charge line matched, and the one that doesn’t match is flagged. Expected against actual, job by job, customer by customer, lane by lane.
Sell$2,204Buy$1,999Margin$205Margin %9.3%Charge Basis Sell Buy Margin % Ocean Freight 40HC 1,411 1,090 321 22.8% Origin Handling 40HC 124 112 12 9.4% Documentation — 0 25 −25 — Destination Delivery 40HC 214 194 20 9.3% Bunker Surcharge 40HC 125 125 0 0.0%
The operator
Ask for the work. Get the finished work back.
Cathy sits beside every screen. She doesn't summarise your operation or suggest what you might do — she does it, and hands you the result.
- Creates the enquiry
- From a message, a forwarded email or a sentence.
- Compares rates
- Across contracts, spot and surcharges, with validity and expiry attached.
- Prepares quotations
- Priced to your margin rules, formatted, attached to the enquiry, waiting on your approval to send.
- Reads documents
- Drop a PDF or spreadsheet into the conversation and the records update.
- Opens bookings and jobs
- Captures the confirmation, opens the file.
- Watches live shipments
- Containers, milestones, free time, exceptions.
- Matches costs
- Vendor invoice against job, line by line.
- Answers from your data
- Lane margin, customer volumes, what's open — every number traced to its record.
She doesn't wait to be asked twice.
Standing instructions run on their own: chase the carrier, flag the delay, prepare the invoice, tell the customer.
Cathy isn't about replacing your people. She handles the work that shouldn't need a person, so your people can do the work that does.
Security and audit
Autonomy you can audit.
Every action runs inside the controls you would put around a member of staff — and leaves a record either way.
- Ground truth
- Nothing is invented. Every number traces to the contract, the carrier feed or the document it came from. A missing value stays missing, and says so.
- Permissions
- She inherits the permissions of the role she's acting for. Nothing more.
- Approvals
- You choose what she does alone and what waits for a signature.
- Confirmation
- Nothing irreversible happens without you confirming it.
- Explainability
- Every number traces to the contract, the carrier feed or the document it came from.
- Live data
- Your production records. Not a copy, not a nightly export.
- Audit trail
- Every action logged with its inputs, its sources and its timestamp.
AI assistants that auto-send things cause incidents. This one asks first, every time.
Other software gives you screens. This gives you finished work.
| Traditional freight software | then | Catupult Forward |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional freight software You open the rate table and compare | Catupult Forward The quotation is on your desk | |
| Traditional freight software You check nine portals for a status | Catupult Forward The customer has already been told | |
| Traditional freight software You key the BL into three systems | Catupult Forward The document filed itself, checked | |
| Traditional freight software You find out the margin at month end | Catupult Forward The margin was known at booking | |
| Traditional freight software Training takes six weeks per hire | Catupult Forward New staff instruct Cathy in plain English | |
| Traditional freight software Growth means more headcount | Catupult Forward Growth means more shipments per person |
That last row is the whole point.
What you can move
Ocean and air, with the inland legs attached.
- Ocean FCL
- Equipment, sailing schedules, cut-offs, bookings, bills of lading, container milestones and carrier commitments.
- Ocean LCL
- Consolidation priced per revenue ton, co-loaders, warehouse hand-offs, documentation and shipment-level margin.
- Air
- Chargeable weight and weight breaks, flight schedules, terminal cut-offs, MAWB and HAWB generation.
- Inland haulage
- Export and import trucking and rail priced onto the ocean or air move, as legs of the shipment.
Road and rail travel as legs of an ocean or air shipment, not as standalone jobs. If door-to-door trucking is your business rather than your first mile, we're not the right fit today.
One product. Different starting points.
The problem looks the same at five people and at five hundred: the work lives between the systems.
- Running on email and spreadsheets
- Everything a shipment needs in one place from day one, without an implementation project.
- On a system that doesn't fit
- The real work moves into the workspace. The system you keep stops being where things get lost.
- On a capable ERP
- The problem isn't missing software — it's that too much operating context sits between systems. Forward closes the gap without touching what you've already built.
See it on your own lanes.
Start with a live demo — the workflow running end to end, not a slide deck. Then evaluate it with the people who'd actually use it: commercial, operations, documentation, finance and IT, in a workspace of your own, before you commit to anything.