Fast rate — a quote from a form, or from a sentence

The fields, and what the engine reasons about

Form mode asks for origin and destination, weight, pallets, pieces, cubic volume, commodity and service level. Weight and pallets are the two that decide most of the price, because the tariff applies a minimum weight per pallet position — so the pallet count is not a packaging detail, it is a rating input.

The Rate button is not a validity check

Rate stays disabled until the panel has enough to price with, and nothing else in the form is gated. So the honest test of a request is not whether the button lights up — it is whether the numbers describe a shipment that could physically exist. Three ratios catch almost everything: weight per pallet, pieces per pallet, and cubic feet per pallet. For palletized dry freight all three should look ordinary, and an empty pallet weighs roughly 40–50 lb before anything is stacked on it, so a weight-per-pallet figure below that is describing something impossible.

The contracts picker

Rating happens against a contract, and the picker searches the contract profiles loaded in your workspace. Pick the customer's own contract to quote them; pick a different one to see what the same lane would cost under other terms. It is also the quickest way to confirm that a contract you expected to be loaded actually is.

Chat mode, and the sample prompts

Flip to Chat and the panel offers an empty state with example prompts — one-click requests that show the kind of sentence the parser expects. Clicking one fills it in as your request, which makes them a useful template for the phrasing but not a guarantee about the contents.

When the answer comes back empty

"No priced options returned", or a contract profile responding at $0.00, is not an error message. Nothing crashed and nothing timed out: the engine understood the request, went looking for a price, and correctly found none. Read it as an answer, and then work out which part of the request made it the right one.

Diagnose it from the shipment, not the contract

Check the ratios before you go hunting for a missing rate. A bad pallet count is the most common cause, and the tariff amplifies it rather than absorbing it — under the LTL pallet minimum, an implausible pallet count bills as a weight nothing like the one you typed, so no contract can produce a sensible price for it. The Reference guide covers that rule and why it decides more money than any single rate does.

• First — Weight, pieces and cubic volume per pallet — do all three look ordinary?
• Second — Origin and destination — is the lane one the chosen contract actually covers?
• Third — The contract itself — is the right profile selected, and is it loaded?

Which mode when

Use Form when you are quoting from a spreadsheet or a rate request with fields you can copy across, because you will see immediately which field is missing. Use Chat when you are reading prose and would rather not transcribe it. And when a chat answer surprises you, re-enter the same shipment in Form mode — seeing the parsed fields laid out is usually enough to spot what the sentence actually said.