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Waterfall Tendering: Auto-Tender Carriers in Order

Use Waterfall Tendering to offer a load to your carriers one at a time, in your order, until one accepts, then book and rate-confirm automatically.

On this page 

What this does

Waterfall Tendering offers a load to a ranked list of carriers automatically, one step at a time, giving each carrier a response window before moving to the next. The first carrier to accept is booked on the load at the offered rate and sent a rate confirmation, and the waterfall ends. If the list runs out, the load is handed back to your coverage desk with an alert rather than going quiet.

  • Cover loads without working the phone. You set the carrier order once; the TMS makes the offers and waits out each response window for you.
  • Your routing guide, your order. Rank carriers by hand on the load, or load a tender profile you saved earlier and start from that.
  • Nothing dead-ends. A carrier that times out stays bookable as a standing offer, you can add carriers you have not onboarded as a fallback tail, and an exhausted list raises an alert back to a human.
  • Built on Workflow Automation. The cascade is a workflow you compose, so you can attach any existing filter or action to it without custom development.
  • One source of truth. The tender ladder, the status chip on Shipment Search and the Company Loadboard, and the Tendering Cockpit all read the same live state.

User Guide

Before you start, what you need first

  • A Truckload shipment with no carrier on the linehaul leg. The waterfall books the carrier onto that leg when someone accepts, so it must be free.
  • Carrier quotes on the load. The ladder is built from the carrier quotes already on the Truckload Quoting page. Add them before you stage anything.
  • A reachable contact on each carrier. A rung can only be sent if the carrier has a contact the TMS can resolve. Carriers with no usable contact are flagged and skipped rather than sent.
  • A default staff member on your organization. Carrier responses are processed as your organization's automation staff member, and that record needs an email address on it. Without one, tendering will not start. See If something doesn't work below.
  • An active workflow to advance the cascade. Pressing Start Tendering sends the first offer only. Every hop after that is made by a Workflow Automation, so build the workflow before you rely on the waterfall running by itself.

How to build a tender ladder on a load

Where to go: Shipments > Truckload > Truckload Quoting, open the shipment, then the Carrier Quotes tab.

  • Tick the carriers you want to offer the load to. The Tender (N) button on the toolbar counts your selection as you go.
  • Press Tender (N). The Tendering tab opens in Draft with one rung per carrier.
  • Use the arrows on each rung to change the running order, the link control to merge a rung into the one above it as a simultaneous offer, and the remove control to drop a carrier.
  • Nothing is sent while the ladder is in Draft. You can rearrange it as much as you like before you start.

The order you tick carriers in does not set the rank. The ladder sorts your selection before staging it: carriers you have onboarded come before carriers you have not, then by carrier score, then by rate. Check the order in Draft and move rungs by hand if you want something different.

How to start tendering

Where to go: Truckload Quoting > the Tendering tab on the shipment.

  • Press Start Tendering. This sends the offer to rung 1 only and starts its response window.
  • The rung changes to Live and shows a countdown and the address the offer went to.
  • Put a carrier that can actually be reached at rank 1. If rung 1 has no resolvable contact it is skipped immediately rather than sent.
  • Everything after rung 1 is the workflow's job. If no workflow is active, the waterfall will sit on rung 1 indefinitely.

How to set up the workflows that run the cascade

Where to go: LSP > Workflow Automation.

You need two separate workflows, not one. Below is the arrangement we recommend.

The trigger both workflows need

Set both workflows to run on the Shipment Scheduler with Frequency = Recurring. You can then choose how often they run: every 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes.

  • We recommend 15 minutes unless you have a reason not to. It is the shortest interval available and it matches the shortest response window the system will use.
  • The interval decides how often the TMS checks, not how long a carrier gets. The response window decides when a rung becomes eligible to move on; the recurring interval decides how soon the TMS notices. A rung whose window runs out just after a run waits until the next one.
  • So a longer interval slows the whole cascade. On a 60-minute interval, a carrier whose window expired five minutes ago can still be sitting there 55 minutes later, however short you set the Timeout Ceiling.

Workflow A, the cascade

  1. Has Open Tenders (filter). Scopes the workflow to loads that are mid-waterfall. It passes when a rung is Live or Standing.
  2. Dynamic Tender Timeout (filter). Gates on the response window. It passes only when the window has elapsed, or when nothing is live at all.
  3. Committed Volume (filter, optional). Checks whether any queued carrier is still within its capacity for that day.
  4. Demote Current Tender (action). Clears the timed-out rung to Standing.
  5. Send Next Tender (action). Offers the load to the next queued rung.

Steps 4 and 5 must be in that order.  Send Next Tender won't send while an offer is still live, and when it can't send, the workflow stops for that run. So Demote Current Tender has to come first — it clears the live rung so Send Next can move to the next carrier. Put Send Next first and it can never send, Demote never runs, and the cascade stalls. 

Workflow B, the exhaustion handoff

  1. Waterfall Exhausted (filter).
  2. Add Alert or Add Assignment (action).

This has to be a separate workflow. The Waterfall Exhausted filter fails on any load that is still cascading, which would halt Workflow A before it did anything. And an exhausted load has no live rung, so it would not pass Workflow A's first filter in any case.

 Workflow B only works if Demote Current Tender in Workflow A has 'Expire the current tender instead' ticked. 

Setting the response window

The Dynamic Tender Timeout filter decides how long each carrier gets. The window is worked out per hop from how close pickup is, so the waterfall speeds up as the load gets hot.

  • Timeout Ceiling and Pickup Buffer are both optional. Left blank they default to 180 minutes and 30 minutes, and the fields show those numbers as placeholders.
  • The window can never be shorter than 15 minutes. That is the floor, because the workflow batch itself runs every 15 minutes.
  • Watch a mistyped ceiling. A ceiling of 0, or anything below 15, saves without complaint but is stored as 15. It does not fall back to the 180-minute default. A mistyped 0 gives you a waterfall that advances every 15 minutes rather than every three hours, so check the value after saving.
  • A negative ceiling cannot be entered. The field strips the minus sign as you type.
  • A Pickup Buffer of 0 is a real setting and is not the same as blank. Zero means no time is held back at all; blank means the 30-minute default.

What the Timeout Ceiling actually does. It is the longest window any one carrier can get. On a load that is not urgent it simply is the window, so in practice the ceiling is what decides how patient your waterfall is day to day. It never stretches a window as pickup gets close: if the time left before pickup is tighter than the ceiling, the tighter number wins.

Choose the ceiling by how many carriers you want tried before pickup. Each hop can take up to the ceiling, so a 180-minute ceiling with six carriers on the ladder is potentially eighteen hours of cascade, and on a load picking up tomorrow morning you would never reach the sixth carrier. A shorter ceiling works through more of your list; a longer one gives each carrier more time to reply. Because the waterfall speeds itself up as pickup nears, the ceiling matters most while the load is still fresh.

What the Pickup Buffer actually does. It is time held back immediately before pickup that you do not want spent waiting for a carrier to reply. Each window is worked out from how long is left until pickup, and the buffer comes off first, so a 30-minute buffer means "work the window out as though pickup were 30 minutes earlier than it really is".

Most of the time it changes nothing. While pickup is still far off, the time left minus the buffer is larger than your ceiling, so the ceiling decides the window and the buffer never comes into it. It only starts to bite once pickup gets close. With the defaults of a 180-minute ceiling and a 30-minute buffer:

  • Pickup in 10 hours — the ceiling wins, so the carrier gets a 180-minute window. The buffer has no effect.
  • Pickup in 3 hours — 180 minutes left, less the 30-minute buffer, gives a 150-minute window.
  • Pickup in 40 minutes — 40 less 30 is 10, which is under the 15-minute minimum, so the window is 15 minutes.

The 15-minute minimum beats the buffer. Once pickup is nearer than the buffer plus 15 minutes, you simply get 15-minute windows. So the buffer squeezes windows down as pickup approaches; it does not stop the waterfall tendering close to pickup.

In short: the ceiling is how long you would like to give each carrier; the time left before pickup, less the buffer, is how long you can afford to. The window is whichever of the two is smaller, and never less than 15 minutes.

The window shown on the Tendering tab is indicative. Confirm the values you configured on the filter itself rather than reading them off the ladder.

Three options worth knowing about

Most of the waterfall steps have nothing to configure — you just place them in the right order. Three checkboxes do change behaviour, and each form explains itself on screen when you open it.

  • On Demote Current Tender: "Expire the current tender instead (offer is no longer bookable)." Tick this if you use Workflow B. The Waterfall Exhausted filter only passes once no standing offers are left, and an offer stays standing even after you press Stop Tendering or Close Standing Offers. With this box unticked, timed-out carriers stay bookable but Workflow B never raises its alert. Ticked, a carrier whose window runs out is closed for good, and the alert fires when the ladder runs out. 
  • On Send Next Tender: "Advance the moment the tender window expires (bypass the 15-minute batch delay)." Ticked, each hop is scheduled for the instant the carrier's window runs out rather than waiting for your workflow's next scheduled run. Use it when you want the cascade to move as fast as the windows allow. Occasionally a hop lands a moment early and is picked up on the following run instead; the cascade carries on by itself either way.
  • On Send Next Tender: "When the ranked list is exhausted, widen to the matching generic fallback carrier list for one more pass." This option is reserved for system-managed fallback lists. We recommend building your fallback tail on the ladder instead, by adding carriers you have not onboarded underneath your preferred ones — see How to add fallback carriers you have not onboarded. You get the same one-more-pass behaviour, you choose exactly which carriers are in it, and you can see them on the ladder before you start. Leave this box unticked.

What the carrier sees

When you tender a carrier, they get an email with a link to a response page. The page shows the load and the rate you tendered. From there the carrier can:

  • Accept $[rate] — books the load at the rate shown, which covers the shipment and ends the waterfall for the rest of the ladder.
  • Not Available — passes on the load; the waterfall moves to the next carrier straight away.
  • Available — tells you they're interested without booking. The carrier sees a note that one of your dispatchers will follow up, and the load keeps tendering.

The tendered rate is fixed: a carrier can't change it or counter from the response page, so they can't negotiate through a tender. A carrier who wants a different rate has to call you. 

How to read the tender ladder

Where to go: Truckload Quoting > the Tendering tab on the shipment.

Each rung shows the carrier, its tier, the rate, its state, and where the offer was sent. The states are:

  • Queued — waiting its turn, further down the ladder. Nothing has been sent to this carrier.
  • Live — currently offered, countdown running.
  • Standing — the window elapsed and the cascade moved on, but this offer is still bookable. A carrier that was passed over can still accept from their offer email until the load is covered or you press Stop Tendering or Close Standing Offers. After that, you can still book them yourself from the Carrier Quotes tab. 
  • Expired — closed and no longer bookable.
  • Rejected — the carrier declined.
  • Accepted / booked — this carrier took the load. The waterfall has ended and the other rungs are closed.

When no carrier is left, the ladder reads Ended; the status chip and alerts call the same state Exhausted. 

The recipient line under each rung shows where the offer goes. The TMS works that out from the carrier's own contacts, preferring their dispatcher contact and the one marked as a favourite, then any other contact with a valid email address, and only then the email on the carrier quote. A rung with nothing to resolve reads No valid contact, this rung will be skipped.

How to stop tendering

You can end a waterfall at any time, or close it out once it has run its course:

  • Stop Tendering — ends the waterfall for good. It closes the live tender and any standing offers, so those carriers can no longer accept from their email, and turns the remaining queued carriers back into regular quotes. Rungs that were already sent stay on the ladder for reference, and any standing carrier is still bookable by hand from the Carrier Quotes tab. To tender again, re-stage the carriers or load a saved template.
  • Close Standing Offers — appears once the ladder has ended. Use it to stop passed-over (standing) carriers from accepting from their email. Those carriers stay on the ladder as standing offers and you can still book them yourself from the Carrier Quotes tab — they just can't self-accept anymore.
  • Reject on the live rung — passes on the carrier you're currently waiting on and moves straight to the next one in line.

You don't have to stop a waterfall for it to end — it ends on its own when it runs out of carriers to try. Stop Tendering and Close Standing Offers are for when you want to end it early or lock it down sooner.

How to add fallback carriers you have not onboarded

Where to go: Truckload Quoting > the Carrier Quotes tab > Add New Carrier Quote.

Every rung is labelled My List or Generic. That label has nothing to do with saved templates. It only says whether the carrier is one you have onboarded:

  • My List — a carrier you have onboarded, with a carrier profile in your organization.
  • Generic — a carrier that exists in the carrier database but that you have not onboarded.

That gives you a simple way to build a fallback tail. Put your own carriers at the top of the ladder and add a few carriers you have not onboarded at the bottom. If your preferred carriers all pass on the load, the cascade carries on into the generic ones instead of running out and handing the load back.

  • Press Add New Carrier Quote and pick a carrier you have not onboarded. The quote saves normally.
  • Fill in the contact details on the quote itself, particularly the Email. This is the part that matters: a carrier you have not onboarded has no contacts stored in your organization, so the address on the quote is the only one the TMS can send the offer to.
  • If you leave the Email blank, that rung is skipped when the cascade reaches it.
  • Stage it with the rest and move it below your preferred carriers in Draft.

You can check it worked from the tier label on the rung: it reads Generic where your own carriers read My List.

How to offer a load to several carriers at once

Where to go: Truckload Quoting > the Tendering tab, with the ladder in Draft.

  • Use the link control on a rung to merge it into the rung above. The two carriers become a single rung showing a Blast chip, both names, and the rate range.
  • When that rung goes live, every carrier in it is offered the load at the same time. The first to accept wins; the others are refused.
  • You can merge more than two carriers into one rung, and you can mix blast rungs and single rungs in the same ladder.
  • If the whole blast times out, the entire rung is demoted together and the cascade moves to the next rung.

How to save, load, and clear a tender template

Where to go: Truckload Quoting > the Tendering tab > the Tender Templates bar in the panel header. The Load, Save, and Delete controls appear once a template name is in the box. 

Arrange the ladder the way you want it, type a name in the template box and press the Save control to store it for your organization.

  • Template names must be at least five characters. The Save control stays greyed out until the name is long enough.
  • Saving onto a name that already exists updates that template. You'll be asked to confirm first, and cancelling changes nothing.
  • A ladder containing a blast rung saves as a flat carrier order. Re-merge the rungs after loading it if you want the blast back.

To reuse one, pick its name from the template box and press Load. The ladder rebuilds from the template, in the saved order.

  • Before tendering has started (Draft): Load replaces the current ladder, ready to start.
  • After a waterfall has ended: Load asks "Restart Tendering?" — confirming clears the ended ladder and rebuilds a fresh draft from the template. Nothing goes out until you press Start Tendering.
  • While tendering is running: the Load control is unavailable, in the same way reorder, merge and remove of already-sent rungs are — stop tendering first if you need to start over.

To remove a saved template, pick its name and press the Delete (trash) control.

To clear a ladder you've built but not started, use Discard — the staged carriers revert to regular quotes (nothing is deleted).

How to cap how many loads a carrier gets

Where to go: LSP > Committed Volume Caps.

  • Create a cap for a carrier with a loads-per-day limit. Caps are a forward commitment: they stop you over-using a carrier you have promised a steady, limited volume to.
  • Usage counts against the pickup date, not the date you tender. A load picking up Thursday counts against Thursday's allowance however far ahead you offer it.
  • Caps apply automatically. A carrier at its cap for the pickup day is skipped when you stage the ladder and again when its turn comes to be offered the load, and it stays bookable by hand. The Committed Volume filter is optional: add it to Workflow A if you want the workflow to stop when every remaining carrier is at its cap. Managing caps requires the TMS Site Admin or LSP Add/Edit permission.
  • Caps are counted per pickup day, so a load with no pickup ready date on its first stop has no day to count against and the cap is not applied. Every shipment is given a pickup date by default, so this only arises if the date and the ready time have both been cleared deliberately.

How to watch every active waterfall at once

Where to go: Shipments > Truckload > Tendering Cockpit.

  • The cockpit lists every load with an active waterfall, ordered by urgency, so your coverage desk can triage them in one place.
  • The page refreshes on its own every 30 seconds.
  • Exhaustion alerts link straight into the cockpit and the load that raised them.

You do not have to open the shipment to see waterfall state. A tender status chip appears in the status cell on the Company Loadboard and Shipment Search, on shipment results in Universal Search, and on shipment cards in the Collaboration Panel. Clicking it opens the ladder in a dialog without taking you off the page you are on.

What happens when a carrier accepts

The carrier accepts from the link in the offer email, or you can accept for them using the green check on the live rung if they call you instead.

  • The carrier is booked onto the linehaul leg of the shipment, and the accepted amount becomes the buy rate on that leg. On a multi-leg load only that leg moves; a pickup leg carrying another carrier is left exactly as it was.
  • The shipment status advances to Sent, and the Activity Log records the change as made via Waterfall Tender, naming the carrier.
  • A rate confirmation is emailed to the carrier with the agreed rate, and the confirmation document is attached to the shipment.
  • The waterfall ends. Every other rung is closed and no further carrier will be offered the load.
  • Accepting is one-way. A load can only be booked once, so a second carrier accepting afterwards is told the load is refused.

The booked rung on the ladder reads booked. To confirm the rate confirmation reached the carrier, check the Communication Log.

Tips and best practices

  • Build the workflow before the ladder. A waterfall with no active workflow sends one offer and then stops. This is the single most common reason a cascade appears to stall.
  • Keep Demote Current Tender ahead of Send Next Tender in Workflow A. The reverse order silently halts the run.
  • Put your most reliable carrier at rank 1. It gets the first and often the longest window.
  • Give your carriers a dispatcher contact with a working email address. That is what the offer is sent to, and it is the difference between a rung that sends and a rung that is skipped.
  • Save a template per lane. If you tender the same carriers for the same lane repeatedly, save that ladder once rather than rebuilding it from the Carrier Quotes grid every time.
  • Do not rely on a tight ceiling. Because the batch runs every 15 minutes, 15 minutes is the shortest real-world hop.
  • Remember standing offers are live. A carrier you passed over can still accept, which is usually what you want, but it means a load is not safe from being covered until you stop tendering.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my waterfall stuck on the first carrier?

Almost always because no Workflow Automation is advancing it. Start Tendering sends rung 1 only; every hop after that is made by the workflow. Check that a workflow containing Has Open Tenders, Demote Current Tender and Send Next Tender is active, that it is triggered by the Shipment Scheduler on a Recurring frequency, and that the load matches its filters.

How short can a tender window be?

Fifteen minutes. The workflow batch runs every 15 minutes, so that is the floor. Setting a Timeout Ceiling below 15 does not produce a shorter window; it is stored as 15.

Can a carrier still accept after their window runs out?

Yes, if the rung shows Standing. A timed-out offer is demoted rather than killed, and stays bookable until the load is covered. A rung showing Expired can no longer be accepted.

What happens if two carriers accept at the same time?

A load can only be booked once. If a second carrier accepts after the load is already booked, their acceptance is refused and the load stays with the first carrier. This applies both across rungs and within a blast rung.

Can I offer a load to more than one carrier at a time?

Yes. Merge rungs together in Draft to make a blast rung, and every carrier in it is offered the load simultaneously, first accept wins.

What is the difference between a My List rung and a Generic rung?

Whether you have onboarded that carrier. A carrier with a profile in your organization shows as My List; a carrier that exists in the carrier database but that you have not onboarded shows as Generic. Adding a quote for a carrier you have not onboarded is how you build a fallback tail at the bottom of the ladder. Give that quote an email address, because a carrier you have not onboarded has no contacts on your side for the offer to go to.

Which leg does the carrier get booked on?

The linehaul leg. On a shipment with more than one transit leg, only the linehaul leg moves to Sent; other legs and their carriers are untouched.

Where do I see which carriers were already offered the load?

On the Tendering tab. The ladder keeps every rung with its state, and the Tender Activity panel lists each offer, demotion and acceptance in order. The shipment Activity Log carries the same events.

Does the carrier see my other carriers or rates?

No. Each carrier receives an offer for the load at their own rate and sees only their own offer.

If something doesn't work

Start Tendering fails with "Error: Unable to start tendering."

This message covers two different causes, and which one it is depends on whether the shipment Activity Log says anything.

  • If the Activity Log has an entry explaining it, the sending account has no email address on its profile. That account is either your own login, the staff member the workflow is set to work as, or your organization's automation staff member. Add an email address to that staff record and start tendering again.
  • If the Activity Log has nothing at all, your organization has no default staff member set. Carrier responses are processed as that staff member, so tendering is refused before anything is written. Set it at LSP > Organization > Edit Settings > Staff for Automation.

A rung was skipped instead of being sent

  • The carrier has no contact the TMS can resolve in your organization. Open the carrier and add a contact with a valid email address, preferably a dispatcher contact.
  • Carrier contacts belong to your organization, so a carrier used by another office may still have none on your side.

The carrier was booked but never got a rate confirmation

The booking can succeed while the confirmation email quietly does not send. There are two things to check.

  • The carrier quote has no email address on it. The rate confirmation is sent to the address stored on the carrier quote. If the Email field on the quote was cleared, the confirmation is skipped silently. Re-send it manually from the shipment using Send Message.
  • Your organization's automation staff member has no email address. The confirmation is sent from that account, and without an address on it the email is never created. Add one at LSP > Organization > Edit Settings.

Confirm either way in the Communication Log.

The countdown is not moving, or a window has sat past its expiry

  • While a carrier's offer is live, the Tendering tab refreshes itself every 30 seconds. If something still looks stuck, reload the page, then check the workflow. 
  • Check that a workflow is active and that this load passes its filters.
  • Check how often that workflow is set to run. A window that expired two minutes ago has not been acted on yet, and on a 60-minute recurring interval it may not be for nearly an hour.

A carrier was tendered even though it is over its cap

  • Check the first stop has a pickup ready date. Caps are counted per pickup day, so a load with no date has nothing to count against.

Still stuck

Contact Tai Support with the shipment ID, the name of the workflow you expected to advance it, and what the Tendering tab and the shipment Activity Log show.

 

 Applies to: Tai TMS, Truckload Quoting and Workflow Automation · Last updated: 2026-10-30