What the Tai TMS Can Do: Capability Catalog

A structured, area-by-area index of the capabilities in the Tai TMS, so you can quickly tell whether the system supports a given task, and where a deeper article covers it in detail.

Overview

The Tai TMS is a transportation management system for freight brokers. It covers the full life of a load: quoting and rating, booking, electronic dispatch, tracking and documents, invoicing and payables, and reporting. It connects to the outside carriers, boards, accounting systems, and payment services a brokerage already uses. This article is a capability map, not a how-to. It lists what the system can do, area by area, and points you to the fuller article whenever one exists.

Everything below is grounded in how the Tai TMS actually behaves today. It deliberately does not list features that are aspirational or unconfirmed, and it includes a plain "what it does not do" section so you get a reliable answer either way.

How it works

Read this catalog as a lookup table for "does the Tai TMS support X?"

Each area lists concrete capabilities as short bullets. If you find your task there, the answer is yes.
When a capability has its own detailed article, the bullet names it in parentheses, for example "(see Rating and quoting)". Those companion articles explain the rules, limits, and edge cases in depth.
If your task is not listed, check the "What the Tai TMS does not do (or requires a workaround)" section under Business rules & limits. It captures the specific gaps and workarounds customers actually run into.
Capabilities that depend on an outside connection (a specific carrier, board, accounting system, or payment provider) are only available if your organization has that integration set up and turned on. Some capabilities are also turned on per organization; where this catalog says "where enabled," ask your Tai contact whether it is on for you.

Capability index by area

Shipments and quoting

Create, quote, book, and manage domestic freight shipments end to end, plus international ocean and air shipments (which use a separate flow).
Handle truckload, less-than-truckload (LTL), and drayage, along with other specialized shipment types.
Get live freight rate quotes from a large network of carriers and rate providers (more than 120 connections, covering LTL, truckload, and parcel carriers, brokerage rate aggregators, and predictive market-rate providers) and compare them side by side in one normalized format (see Rating and quoting).
Price accessorials (extra services such as liftgate or residential delivery) into a quote, and capture commodities, weight, freight class, equipment/trailer type, declared value, and mileage.
Track a shipment through a defined status lifecycle from Quote to Complete, with a visual status bar (see Shipment Lifecycle and Statuses).
Duplicate a shipment to spin up similar loads quickly (up to 20 copies at once), choosing which details, including which reference numbers, carry over.
Consolidate multiple shipments under a parent so they can be handled together, and remove a single shipment from a consolidation when needed (see Business rules & limits).
Capture your own custom reference numbers on shipments (and on individual stops or commodities) when a built-in reference field does not exist. You define the field name, its data type, where it applies, and who sees it, and then search shipments by it. Where enabled, the reference fields a shipment shows can follow the organizations on that shipment, with required fields, predefined values, and default values (see Custom reference numbers and shipment field customization).
Where marketplace buying and selling is enabled, a marketplace buyer or seller can request that a marketplace seller or a TONU (truck order not used) leg be added to or removed from a shipment, and the other party accepts or rejects the request.
Read shipment data off uploaded documents through the built-in document processor (OCR intake).

Dispatch and carrier connections

Tender a load to a carrier electronically instead of calling or emailing, triggered automatically when the shipment is advanced to the Ready stage (see Electronic Dispatch to Carriers).
Capture the carrier's acceptance and the reference numbers it returns (pickup/confirmation number, PRO number, and where applicable a bill-of-lading reference) onto the shipment automatically.
Surface a carrier's rejection with a clear alert so staff can correct the load and re-dispatch it.
Tender a truckload to a ranked list of carriers in sequence using waterfall tendering, where your organization has it enabled: staff offer the load down a tier-ordered ladder of carriers one at a time (advancing to the next carrier as offers are declined or time out), watch tender status inline as it changes, and can stop the waterfall at any point.
Where waterfall tendering is enabled, committed volume limits can be set so that a carrier that has already reached its committed volume for the pickup date is passed over. The wait time for each offer can follow the timeout set in the workflow that runs the ladder, and an accepted tender moves the shipment to Sent and records the accepted rate. An earlier offer that stays open as a standing offer can still be accepted from the carrier's tender link until staff stop tendering or close standing offers, and the tender history is kept under its own Tendering category in the shipment activity log.
Connect to carriers two ways: an API connection (real-time) or an EDI connection (standardized document exchange, slower and batch-based). See Workflow Automation and Electronic Carrier Connections.
Keep a carrier relationship history on the carrier record (contact notes, when the carrier was last contacted, and a domicile address) where carrier contact tracking is enabled.

Tracking, visibility, and documents

Retrieve a shipment's current status, milestone dates (scheduled, estimated, and actual pickup and delivery), reported location, and who signed for delivery, pulled directly from the carrier (see Shipment tracking, visibility, and documents).
Look a shipment up by a reference the carrier supports: pickup (PU) number, PRO number, customer reference, purchase order, shipper reference, or quote number.
Normalize each carrier's own status into one consistent Tai status vocabulary so all shipments read the same way.
Retrieve carrier documents (proof of delivery (POD), bill of lading (BOL), corrected BOL, carrier invoice, inspection certificate, and carrier confirmation) and attach them to the shipment.
Run tracking automatically on a scheduled background check as well as on demand.
Receive location updates pushed in by visibility partners and external tracking sources. Start and maintain a shipment's driver-tracking session, including through the public API (start, update, refresh, cancel, read, and send a message), so that location updates can be pushed in and reflected on the shipment.
Where enabled, raise a shipment alert automatically from certain tracking-provider updates, such as a load that is behind schedule or cannot make its appointment, a temperature outside its range, a possible-fraud flag, or a load the provider is not tracking.
Automatically apply a carrier-reported LTL re-weigh to the shipment within defined tolerances (see Automatic Weight Updates from Carrier Reports).

Locations, mapping, and geocoding

Keep a location history for every shipment (origin, in-transit points, destination), each with a date, a readable place description, and map coordinates where available (see Shipment Locations and Geocoding).
Convert a stop's full street address into map coordinates, and convert incoming GPS tracking pings back into readable place names.
Show a "latest known location" that follows the shipment's stage (origin before movement, newest ping in transit, destination once delivered).
Support United States, Canadian, and Mexican addresses.

Accounting: receivables, payables, and credit

Invoice customers automatically at a chosen point in the shipment's life (at billing, at delivery, or at committed), with safety checks that hold questionable shipments for review (see Automated Customer Invoicing and Its Guardrails).
Email invoices to the customer's billing contact automatically, with required paperwork attached when the customer requires it.
Audit incoming carrier bills against the agreed rate, auto-approve the ones within tolerance, and route the rest to a variance list for staff review (see Carrier Bill Audit and Automatic Payables). Staff can also send a bill or an invoice to the variance list and resolve it back to ready, and an integration with the right permissions can do the same through the public API.
Track each customer's credit exposure against a credit limit (counting both unpaid invoices and in-flight shipments) and place customers on credit holds (see Customer Credit Limits and Credit Holds).
Work the full receivables and payables cycle: create and deliver invoices, consolidate invoices, receive customer payments, run collections, approve and pay carrier bills, assign check numbers, and review payment history.
Approve staff commissions and run general-ledger (GL) reporting.
Work carriers paid through a factoring company so their bills and payments are routed correctly. Where enabled, choose for each carrier whose name and address its payments go to: the carrier's name, its DBA name, a factoring company, or an address you enter yourself.
Apply Canadian taxes (GST, HST, and PST) to customer charges, where enabled. Tax is calculated from the province of a Canadian stop on the shipment, appears only on the customer side (it is left out of carrier payables, buy totals, margin, and carrier-facing documents), and the system prompts staff to recalculate it when the freight amount changes.
Show charge lines in a consistent order on invoices, bills, and electronic invoices (linehaul first, then fuel, then everything else), where enabled.
Sync invoices, bills, and payments to QuickBooks and review the sync history.

Integrations and the public API

Connect across integration categories: carriers and rating engines, tracking/visibility providers, load boards, accounting systems, payment and settlement services (including credit-card processing and carrier-payment services), fuel-pricing services, and factoring companies (see Integrations and Public API Overview).
Use supporting integrations such as carrier onboarding/compliance networks, document OCR, dock/appointment scheduling, and shared-inbox/communication tools.
Build your own integration against a documented, versioned public API that can quote rates; book and manage shipments, alerts, assignments, and documents; check status; drive driver tracking; look up shipment locations; and work with customers, carriers, invoices, bills, payments, commissions, staff, organizations, custom reference types, and load-board data. Version 2 is the current version. Most of the original version 1 operations have been retired, and a few of the remaining ones answer that they are no longer available and direct callers to version 2.
Receive inbound partner notifications (webhooks) so partner systems can push updates into the Tai TMS.
Operate within request rate limits on the public API: request volume is measured against per-organization and per-API-key limits (per-minute, per-day, and per-month) that Tai can configure.

Load posting to load boards

Advertise available loads to external truckload boards from inside the TMS, and update (repost) or remove those postings (see Posting Available Loads to Load Boards).
Post to DAT, Truckstop, 10-4, Trucker Tools, 123 Loadboard, Motive (formerly Keep Truckin), and Load Board Network, plus a general connector for certain other partner boards.
Repost loads automatically on a schedule to keep them fresh, and remove them when they should no longer be shown.

Workflow automation

Build automation rules that watch for a trigger (a status change, milestone, or other event), narrow it with filters (by customer, lane/region, or other criteria), and then perform actions automatically such as sending a message, sending a webhook, or advancing work (see Workflow Automation and Electronic Carrier Connections).
Scope rules to run on a schedule or within particular time windows.
Where enabled, trigger a rule a set time after an entry is recorded in a shipment's action log, using the action types your administrator maintains.
Create, duplicate, delete, and test a rule before it goes live, and monitor what your automation actually did: which rules fired, what messages went out, and how well it is covering your shipments.

Reporting and exports

Run built-in operational and accounting reports, including the profitability, customer trends, carrier summary, and shipped reports, GL reporting, and AR/AP aging and dashboards (see Reports and Exports Catalog).
Search and filter shipments, invoices, bills, and payments in list/grid screens that can be exported.
Use a configurable custom-report engine to define the columns and sections you want per entity (for example carrier or shipment reports), save and share reports, and deliver them on a schedule by email, FTP, or SFTP.
Customize the columns each staff member sees on financial and shipment grids.

Customer portal and roles

Give the broker's own staff a back-office operational workspace and give customers a separate self-service customer portal (front office), with access determined by the permissions and settings on each person's login (see User Roles and Portal Access).
Let customers sign in to view a dashboard, create, resume, duplicate, and track their own shipments and quotes, keep an address book and product catalog, pay invoices, run reports, and manage account settings, scoped to only their own organization's data.
Turn individual portal capabilities on or off for each portal user (for example, whether they can pay invoices online, see rates, or book particular shipment types), and hide carrier information from a customer's portal.
Limit a portal user to the shipments they created themselves, or give them organization-wide access to all of their organization's shipments.
Tailor staff access by permission so team members only reach the areas appropriate to their job (for example, accounting screens).

Business rules & limits

Capabilities across the Tai TMS are gated by configuration (which integrations and capabilities your organization has enabled) and by permission (what each login is allowed to reach). Beyond that, the following are the notable things the system does not do, or does differently than customers sometimes expect. These are the verified gaps and workarounds worth knowing before you assume a behavior.

What the Tai TMS does not do (or requires a workaround)

It does not reclassify freight class automatically. The automatic LTL update path adjusts weight only. If a carrier reclassifies freight, the class is not changed for you; a person must update it manually (see Automatic Weight Updates from Carrier Reports).
It does not auto-apply a very large weight change. A carrier-reported LTL weight is auto-applied only when it differs by at least 20 lb and by less than 40% of the current weight. A difference over 40% is left for a person to review and update manually.
Electronic dispatch is not a separate button; it is driven by status. There is no standalone "dispatch" action; advancing a shipment to the Ready stage is what tenders it to the carrier. Seeing "electronic dispatch is not available for this shipment" is normal when the carrier has no electronic connection, not an error.
Reposting a load is not a separate action either; it is status-driven. Updating or reposting a load board posting is handled inside the normal post flow based on the load's posting status (post, repost, or remove); on some boards a repost is carried out as a fresh post, so a reposted load can appear as a new listing.
Automatic customer invoicing is limited to truckload, LTL, and drayage. Other shipment types (such as international air/ocean, small package, and cartage) are always invoiced manually, regardless of the customer's auto-invoice setting.
A shipment that drifts from its quote will not auto-invoice. Auto-invoicing is all-or-nothing: a changed route, tariff, margin, freight class beyond one class, weight beyond ~20 lb, or a non-qualifying type stops it, and the shipment falls back to manual handling.
A carrier bill that is out of tolerance is not paid automatically, and one that cannot be matched will not auto-approve. Out-of-tolerance or unmatched bills are flagged to a variance list for a person to work rather than being paid silently.
A customer payment must be applied in full before it can be registered. When receiving a payment, the amount applied across the selected invoices has to equal the payment amount exactly, and a negative check amount is refused.
Removing a shipment from a consolidation is possible, with conditions. You can take a single shipment out of a consolidated group using the Unconsolidate Shipment action, which unlinks that shipment without canceling it, but only before accounting has started on it (once billing has begun on that shipment, the option is withdrawn). A shipment that is already part of a consolidation cannot be added to a second one, and canceling the parent unlinks all of its children at once (without canceling them).
Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) is not a built-in shipment/booking field. The back-office shipment screens do not capture a VIN by default, and there is no built-in VIN reference type. (Equipment/trailer type is captured and is used for quoting and load posting; VIN is not.) You can still track a VIN by creating a custom reference field for it (see Custom reference numbers and shipment field customization); Trailer Number, by contrast, is a built-in reference you can capture directly.
Carrier status tracking is pulled, not pushed live. For carriers connected by API, the system retrieves status on demand or on a schedule rather than receiving a continuous real-time feed, so the status you see reflects the most recent successful pull and can lag a real-world event. Visibility partners and external tracking sources can push location updates in separately.
Rate quotes are live, not cached. Each quote request goes to the carrier at that moment; the system does not serve a previously saved price. A carrier that does not run the lane comes back "not serviced," and a slow carrier can time out. Neither fails the rest of the quote.
Credit limits of zero are not enforced. Credit checking applies only when a customer has a credit limit greater than zero; a limit of zero (or none) means no ceiling is enforced.
Geocoding plots the shipment's street address and depends on address quality. The map is drawn from the full street address (United States, Canada, and Mexico); an incomplete, misspelled, or ambiguous address may not plot, and once an address fails to resolve it will not plot until it is corrected.
Canadian tax is a customer-side charge only. Where Canadian tax handling is enabled, tax lines are never part of what a carrier is paid and are left out of buy totals and margin. Province rates come from a rate lookup, and if the lookup cannot supply them the system uses built-in fallback rates, so check the rates on a shipment if the exact current rate matters.
Older public API operations are being retired. Most version 1 operations no longer exist, and a few more return a "no longer available" message. New integrations should use version 2.
The integration catalog is broad but not universal. The Tai TMS connects to many carriers, boards, tracking providers, accounting systems, and payment/fuel/factoring services, but not to every possible vendor; availability depends on the current catalog and what your organization has enabled.

Frequently asked questions

Can the Tai TMS get quotes from many carriers at once and let me compare them?

Yes. The Tai TMS requests live rate quotes from the carriers and rate providers you have configured (a large network of more than 120 connections spanning LTL, truckload, and parcel carriers, brokerage rate aggregators, and predictive market-rate providers) and translates every reply into one standard format so you can compare them side by side. A failure from one carrier (not serviced, timeout, or error) does not break the rest of the results.

Can the Tai TMS dispatch a load to a carrier electronically?

Yes. When you advance a shipment to the Ready stage, the Tai TMS automatically tenders the load to the assigned carrier over that carrier's connection: an API connection (real-time) or an EDI connection (batch-based, slower). If the carrier accepts, the shipment advances and its reference numbers are captured; if it rejects, the shipment is flagged so staff can fix and re-dispatch. There is no separate dispatch button.

Can the Tai TMS offer a truckload to several carriers in order until one takes it?

Yes, where your organization has waterfall tendering enabled. Staff rank carriers into tiers and the Tai TMS offers the load down that ladder one carrier at a time, moving to the next carrier as an offer is declined or times out. Tender status is shown inline as it changes, and staff can stop the waterfall at any point. This lets you work a prioritized list of carriers automatically instead of contacting each one by hand. Where committed volume limits have been set, a carrier that has already reached its limit for the pickup date is passed over, and the tender history is recorded under its own Tendering category in the shipment's activity log.

Can the Tai TMS track a shipment and pull the proof of delivery automatically?

Yes. The Tai TMS looks a shipment up with the carrier using a reference number (such as the PU or PRO number) and brings back the current status, milestone dates, location, and who signed for delivery, and it can retrieve documents like the proof of delivery and bill of lading and attach them to the shipment. Carrier tracking is pull-based (on demand or on a scheduled check), so it reflects the most recent successful pull rather than a live feed. Location updates from visibility partners and external tracking sources can also be pushed in.

Can the Tai TMS invoice my customers automatically?

Yes, per customer. You can set a customer to invoice automatically at billing, at delivery, or when committed, and the system runs safety checks (profitability, margin, route, tariff, freight class, weight, and shipment type) before it creates the invoice, and can email it with required paperwork attached. Automatic invoicing applies to truckload, LTL, and drayage shipments; other types are invoiced manually.

Can the Tai TMS audit carrier bills so staff only touch the exceptions?

Yes. The Tai TMS compares each incoming carrier bill to the agreed rate on the shipment, auto-approves and records bills that match within tolerance, and flags bills that are over, under, or unmatched to a variance list for staff to review. The underbilling and overbilling tolerances can be tuned separately, and approved bills get a due date from the carrier's payment terms. A bill or invoice that is on the variance list can be resolved back to ready by staff, or by an integration with the right permissions, without changing any amounts.

Can the Tai TMS post my available loads to load boards?

Yes. The Tai TMS can post, repost, and remove loads on DAT, Truckstop, 10-4, Trucker Tools, 123 Loadboard, Motive (formerly Keep Truckin), and Load Board Network, plus a general connector for certain other partner boards. Posting runs on a regular automated cadence rather than instantly, and a problem on one board does not stop your other boards from posting.

Can the Tai TMS sync with QuickBooks and handle factoring?

Yes. The Tai TMS syncs invoices, bills, and payments to QuickBooks and keeps a sync history, and it supports carriers paid through a factoring company so their bills and payments are routed correctly. Where it is enabled, you can also choose for each carrier whether payments go to the carrier's name, its DBA name, a factoring company, or an address you enter. It also integrates with payment and settlement services, including credit-card processing and carrier-payment services, depending on what your organization has enabled.

Can the Tai TMS charge Canadian taxes?

Yes, where Canadian tax handling is enabled for your organization. The Tai TMS can add GST, HST, and PST charge lines to a customer's charges based on the province of a Canadian stop on the shipment, and it prompts staff to recalculate the tax when the freight amount changes. Tax is a customer-side charge only: it is not paid to carriers, it is left out of buy totals and margin, and it does not appear on carrier-facing documents.

Can the Tai TMS give my customers self-service access to their own shipments?

Yes. Customers sign in to a separate customer portal (front office) scoped to only their own organization's data, where they can view a dashboard, create, resume, duplicate, and track shipments and quotes, keep an address book and product catalog, pay invoices, run reports, and manage settings. Individual portal features (such as online invoice payment, rates, or carrier information) can be turned on or off, and each portal user can be limited to the shipments they created or given access to all of their organization's shipments. Broker staff work in a separate permission-based back office.

Can the Tai TMS automate repetitive steps with rules?

Yes. You can build workflow automation rules that watch for a trigger, narrow the scope with filters (by customer, lane, or other criteria), and then take actions automatically such as sending a message or a webhook or advancing work, optionally on a schedule. Rules can be tested before they go live, and a monitoring area shows what the automation actually did and how well it is covering your shipments.

Can I integrate my own software with the Tai TMS?

Yes. The Tai TMS publishes a documented, versioned public API that lets your systems quote rates, book and manage shipments, check status, drive driver tracking, and work with customers, carriers, invoices, bills, payments, commissions, staff, organizations, custom reference types, and load-board data. It also accepts inbound webhooks so partner systems can push updates in. Access uses an API key, and the API is kept backward-compatible within a version. Version 2 is the current version; most of the original version 1 operations have been retired. Public API request volume is measured against per-organization and per-API-key rate limits (per-minute, per-day, and per-month) that Tai can configure.

Can the Tai TMS reclassify freight class automatically when a carrier re-rates a load?

No. The automatic update path adjusts an LTL shipment's weight only, within tolerance. Freight class is never changed for you. If a carrier reclassifies freight, someone has to update the class manually. This is one of the few places where the system intentionally leaves the decision to a person.