You pay one blended number today and never learn how much of it reached the truck. On Load Guardrails you see the carrier's rate and the broker's margin as separate lines, you tender to carriers whose authority is on file, and everyone works from one shared record. A funded-load layer — where you fund the load once and the milestones you already care about, pickup and delivery, release the money — is planned as an opt-in capability.
This funded-load and settlement layer is planned as an opt-in capability. It is not live today.
The average shipper remits within 90 days of delivery. Some longer. When the opt-in funded layer is enabled, the load would be prefunded before it moves. That is a real operational change, and we'd rather say so than bury it.
funded: carrier rate, insurance, and agreed accessorialsEvery party reads the same address under its own key. Your key opens origin, destination, cost, and status. A broker administering your load opens your slice, the carrier's slice, and its own margin. The carrier never sees your cost; you always see what you agreed to pay and how it was split.
| Settlement entry (planned funded layer) | To | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| funds_received | platform | $2,850.00 |
| release_pickup_30 | carrier usdot:1593734C | $750.00 |
| release_delivery_70 | carrier usdot:1593734C | $1,750.00 |
| broker_margin | Example Brokerage LLC | $350.00 |
A carrier can only be tendered your load if it passes the checks on file. The gate is deny-by-default: a carrier under review is not a carrier that can be tendered.
Active FMCSA authority for property, held by a carrier, not a broker, with no out-of-service order. A "carrier" with only broker authority is the classic double-brokering pattern and is rejected outright.
An active auto-liability policy of at least $1,000,000 and active motor truck cargo of at least $100,000, evidenced by a certificate. Expired or under-limit is a rejection, not a note.
W-9, certificate of insurance, signed agreement, and authority letter on file.
Authority under six months old, a free-mail domain, no phone on file. These route to human review rather than rejection, and review means no tender until cleared.
Today a claim is your paperwork against theirs. On Load Guardrails the rate con is the load's terms, the BOL is the pickup entry written by the carrier, the POD is the delivery entry written by your receiver, and the settlement ledger is the invoice. All four parties read the same object, so the question is never "whose version," only "what does the record say."
Pickup and delivery windows are part of the terms at creation. Detention is measured against the record, not against a phone call.
Agreed at creation and included in the funded amount. An accessorial nobody agreed to has nowhere to be written.
There is no 210 to validate against a contract. In the planned funded layer, the settlement ledger is the contract executing.
A receiver reads its own slice of the load: the PO and the delivery window. Nothing about rates or margins. When the receiver confirms delivery, the POD is written to the record; in the planned opt-in funded layer, that confirmation releases the carrier's final milestone payment; settlement terms are set when the funded-load capability launches. It is the last entry before the record is complete.
A load has one address. The units inside it can too. A manufacturer can assign an address per unit at production, tied to its serial number, printed on the carton or carried on a standard tag, so a load's contents are verifiable item by item at pickup and at the dock. Counterfeits become detectable; warranty verification becomes a lookup; reverse logistics gets a trail.
Item-level addressing is on the roadmap after the load spine; the per-unit tags read with ordinary scanning infrastructure.
Carriers use Load Guardrails free; brokers and shippers pay for the platform's paid capabilities; pricing is published before those capabilities launch. A funding method would be needed only if you opt into the planned funded-load layer once it launches.
Shippers, manufacturers, and receivers: get on the interest list and we'll walk through your lanes and what the platform looks like for your volume.
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