Nobody likes keying in rate confirmations.
If you’re a dispatcher, you’ve got more important things to worry about—finding loads, tracking trucks, talking to brokers—not copying numbers from a PDF into a website.
The Problem: keying in Rate Confirmations Are a Disruption
Let’s be honest: dispatchers don’t fill out rate confirmations during the day.
Why? Because it kills your flow. You’re juggling calls, texts, and last-minute issues. Sitting down to open a PDF and retype everything into a TMS? That’s a task for after-hours—if you even get to it. And when it slips through the cracks, managers start chasing you down for updates.
I know, because I was asked to help solve exactly this problem for a carrier.
Stop #1: Airtable
Our first step was building a quick solution in Airtable.
After some experimentation and research, we landed on using OpenAI’s API to extract the data and pushed it into Airtable using their API. By the end, we had a button that could read a rate confirmation and auto-fill the load info.
It worked. Dispatchers clicked a button, and their fields were filled out automatically.
“It made their lives way, way easier,” the manager told me.
Stop #2: ITS Dispatch (It Needed It Too)
The catch? The actual TMS being used was ITS Dispatch—and unlike Airtable, ITS had no public API.
That meant we couldn’t push the data directly. So we had to get creative with how we handled it.
The Solution: A Chrome Extension That Autofills
We built a Chrome extension specifically for dispatchers using ITS Dispatch.
It reads the rate confirmation PDF and extracts the key details: order number, broker rate, pickup address, dropoff address, and more.
Then it autofills that data directly into the TMS—right in your browser.
It’s simple, fast, and fits right into your current workflow.
You can see how it works here
Stop Doing Work That’s Beneath You
If you’re a dispatcher tired of wasting time on repetitive data entry, let’s fix that.
Reach out (hello@bluepocket.ca) —we might already have an automated solution ready for you.