Using flat pricing for tenders and trips
Flat pricing lets you set one all-in price for a whole tender or trip — for what your customer pays, what you pay a carrier, or both — instead of letting every order or leg on it price itself individually. It’s built for the kind of consolidated, multi-drop freight that’s common in US brokerage and LTL work, where the real commercial deal is a single number for the whole load, not a sum of separate order-level rates.
When to use it
Use flat pricing whenever the price you’ve actually agreed with a customer or carrier is one number for the whole tender or trip, not a per-order rate — for example, a multi-stop LTL run you’ve quoted as one flat total, or a truckload you’re handing to a carrier for one all-in price regardless of how many orders ride on it. Leave flat pricing alone and everything prices normally, order by order and leg by leg, exactly as it always has.
Setting a flat price
Open the Tender or Trip and find its Flat pricing section. There are two independent sides:
Customer (sell) — the total your customer is invoiced for every order on this tender or trip.
Carrier (buy) — the total you pay the carrier running it.
Type an amount on either side and click Set. The two sides are completely independent — you can flat-price what the customer pays while the carrier side still prices leg by leg as normal, or the other way around, or both at once.
How the total gets split
Every order (for a customer price) or leg (for a carrier price) still carries its own share of the flat total for reporting, invoicing and payables — Kahala TMS splits it automatically, in proportion to what each order or leg would normally have cost if it had priced itself individually. A bigger, heavier or longer-haul order gets a bigger slice of the total; a small drop gets a small slice. If there isn’t enough information yet to weigh the split fairly — for instance, a carrier target price set before any carrier is assigned — the total is simply divided evenly across the group instead.
This split is for your own internal reporting and accounting only. It never changes what your customer is actually invoiced or what your carrier is actually paid — those are always exactly the flat total you set, no matter how the internal split comes out.
Posting a target rate before you have a carrier
A tender’s carrier price can be set before any carrier is assigned — this is exactly what you need to post freight to a load board. Set your target buy rate as the tender’s flat carrier price, post the tender out, and once a carrier accepts, assign them to it as normal. Your target price doesn’t change — it simply becomes the confirmed rate for the carrier you assigned. A trip’s carrier price works differently: because a trip is something you’ve actively dispatched rather than posted out for bids, a carrier has to already be assigned before you can flat-price it.
Rules to know
A flat customer price can only be set when every order on the tender or trip belongs to the same customer — there’d be no single invoice for a mixed-customer total to land on.
Once an order has been invoiced, or a leg has been paid, its flat price can no longer be changed — that side of the deal is already settled.
Clearing a flat price unlocks every order or leg it covered and lets each one price itself normally again, exactly as if the flat price had never been set.
Reverting to automatic pricing
Click Revert to automatic on either side at any time — as long as nothing on it has been invoiced or paid yet — to undo a flat price. Every order or leg it covered goes back to pricing itself normally from its own rate card or carrier rate.
Spotting a flat-priced tender or trip
The Tenders and Trips lists both show a Pricing column — Flat (sell), Flat (buy), or Flat (both) — so you can tell at a glance which ones are running on a flat price instead of normal rating.
Finding your way back from an order
Open any order that’s part of a flat-priced tender or trip and you’ll see a banner near the top of the page — “On Tender …” or “On Trip …” — that takes you straight there.