CargoWise reporting, done for you
Every shipment your forwarding business touches already carries a job P&L — revenue lines, cost accruals, the branch, the lane, the salesperson. A senior US-based engineer turns those job files into live views of profitability, lane margin, customs throughput, and receivables, then keeps them refreshing. Prepaid hours, no contracts, most builds in 3–5 business days.
Representative dashboard — sample data
Forwarding economics, straight from the job
Freight forwarders, customs brokers, and 3PLs run their whole operation through the job file, yet the margin conversation still starts with someone exporting a report and rebuilding the same workbook. We take those job records — revenue and cost lines, accruals, containers and chargeable weight, the branch, the debtor, the sales rep — and build the reporting layer on top of them: profitability per shipment, accrual versus actual on jobs still open, revenue and volume by trade lane, and AR aging by customer.
The gap is almost never missing data. It is that the platform answers one question at a time, per job or per period, while the questions owners actually ask cut across everything: which lanes are earning less per container than they did last quarter, which branch is carrying the most unbilled cost on open files, which customer's aging balance is quietly funding their freight. A governed semantic model puts those beside each other, refreshes on a schedule, and drills back to the individual job.
Reports we build from CargoWise
Buy a block of prepaid Flex hours and, if you're unhappy within the first 4 hours, we refund you in full — no questions asked. We scope each task and quote the hours before work starts, hours deduct only for work you approve, and your banked hours never expire.
Why forwarders pick us
You send the request; a senior engineer builds and maintains the reporting around your own charge codes, branches, lanes, and job types.
Most of what is sold for this is middleware and a starter file you wire up yourself, then own forever. We work the other way: you describe the report, and a senior engineer builds the extract, the model, and the pages around the way your business actually codes its jobs.
Profit per job and per container, accrued cost against supplier invoices posted, revenue and volume by origin–destination pair, margin by branch and salesperson, customs declarations and exception rates, and receivables aging by debtor — in one model rather than six exports.
Power BI ships no first-party CargoWise connector, and the access route is the part that decides the build. We confirm what your licence and administrator can actually give us — a replicated reporting database, the XML integration interface, or scheduled exports — before spending an hour.
One US-based engineer with 20+ years on the Microsoft platform does the extract, the semantic model, and the DAX — no offshore handoffs and no junior guesswork on the margin numbers your owners and your bank read.
Buy a block of Flex hours, get a scope-and-hours estimate before any work, and hours deduct only for approved builds. No project minimum, no retainer, and a full refund inside the first 4 hours if you are unhappy.
A reporting solution shaped around your own operation, not a starter template. We map your job types, charge codes, branches and departments, debtors, carriers, and trade lanes into a governed semantic model, write the measures that define margin the way your finance team defines it, then maintain that model as the business changes. You review; we build and keep it running.
The discipline underneath is ordinary star-schema work done carefully: one row per job at the right grain, charge lines separated from job headers so revenue and cost never double-count, a real date table so month-on-month and rolling views behave, and currency conversion handled once rather than in every visual. That is the same craft described on our Power BI data modeling and DAX page, and where the data already lands in a database our SQL Server dashboard development page covers the direct route.
Six areas cover most first engagements: job and shipment profitability, accrual versus actual on open jobs, trade-lane volume and margin, branch and salesperson margin, customs-entry throughput, and AR aging by customer. Each becomes a page in one model instead of a separate export somebody has to run and reconcile.
Job profitability is the anchor, and the definition matters more than the visual. Whether disbursements pass through at cost, how inter-branch and agent splits are treated, which charge codes count as revenue rather than recovery, and whether a job's profit is measured in the billing currency or the group currency — those rules get pinned down with you first and encoded once as measures, so every page agrees. Profit per container and per chargeable weight unit sit beside profit per job, because a lane can look healthy in total while earning less on every box moved.
Accrual versus actual on open jobs is the report that changes behaviour fastest. While a file is open, cost is an estimate; the supplier invoice arrives later and often differs. Showing accrued cost beside invoices actually posted, ranked by the size of the gap and by how long the job has been open past your cut-off, turns month-end surprises into a working list. Customs brokers add entry throughput on top — declarations lodged by broker and entry type, exception and hold rates, and time from arrival to release — so staffing and problem entries are visible during the week rather than after it.
A quick reference for what each area of the platform contributes, the metrics we surface from it, and the grain we model it at. Nothing here is a benchmark or a promised number — it is the shape of the reporting, filled with your own data.
| Platform area | Metrics the dashboard surfaces | Grain we model at |
|---|---|---|
| Forwarding jobs | Revenue, cost, job profit and margin percentage; profit per container and per chargeable weight unit | One row per job file, with charge lines held separately |
| Open-job accruals | Accrued cost against supplier invoices posted, unbilled revenue, and exposure on files open past your cut-off | Job by charge code and cost provider |
| Trade lanes | Volume by container, TEU and chargeable weight; revenue, margin and unit margin by lane and mode | Origin–destination pair by mode by month |
| Customs entries | Declarations lodged, entry-type mix, exception and hold rate, and elapsed time from arrival to release | One row per declaration, by broker and port |
| Sales & branch | Margin by branch, department, salesperson and controlling customer; new versus repeat business | Job rolled up to the org hierarchy and the rep |
| Accounts receivable | Aging buckets, days sales outstanding, and disputed or credit-held balances by debtor | Invoice by debtor by age bucket |
Through whichever supported route your licence and configuration allow. In practice that means one of four: a replicated reporting database — the platform's data warehouse or operational data store offering — the XML integration interface, scheduled report exports for small and stable extracts, or a staging database your IT team already maintains. We confirm the route with your CargoWise administrator in the scope estimate, before any hours are used.
Which one fits is the real design decision, and it turns on history and cadence. A replicated database is the strongest foundation because it lets us pull years of job and charge history incrementally, rather than asking a production system to re-serve it every morning. Where only exports or the integration interface are available, we land each delivery into a staging layer we control, so the model reads a stable copy and a failed delivery never blanks a report. Either way, the report queries the modeled copy rather than pointing at production and hoping.
Refresh cadence deserves its own conversation on this platform, because open jobs are not static: an accrual posted today changes a margin figure that a report already showed last week. So we do not just append new rows — we reload the open and recently closed window on every run while older, settled periods stay put. Microsoft's incremental refresh documentation (opens in new tab) describes that pattern, and where the source sits on your own network an on-premises data gateway (opens in new tab) carries the connection. We configure it, document it, and fix breakages out of your banked hours — the maintenance part connector tools leave to you. We are not affiliated with WiseTech Global or Microsoft and never imply a partnership; we use documented interfaces to your own data.
You buy prepaid Flex hours that never expire: Starter $2,500, Growth $4,600, or Power $8,000, with hours from $100. There is no project minimum and no retainer — you send a request, we reply with a scope and the hours it needs, and hours deduct only for work you approve.
The usual pattern here is a Growth or Power block, because the extraction route and the charge-line model are front-loaded work; the remaining hours go to extra pages, measure changes, and refresh care over the following months. Most individual tasks ship in 3–5 business days once you approve the estimate, and a first full build gets a clear timeline up front. If you want the general cost picture before talking to anyone, our guide to what a Power BI dashboard costs to build breaks down the drivers, and how prepaid Flex hours work covers the mechanics.
Freight forwarders, customs brokers, NVOCCs, and 3PLs running the platform — usually where an owner, CFO, or operations director is tired of assembling the same margin workbook, or where a multi-branch group cannot see itself whole. Businesses with no in-house BI team get the most from it, because maintenance sits with us rather than being added to a controller's week.
You own everything: the report file, the semantic model and measures, the extraction logic, the refresh schedule, and the service account all live in your tenant and your systems. There is no black box and no licence to us — if you never send another request, the dashboards keep running. Groups that also warehouse and sell goods will find the stock and fill-rate side on our Power BI for wholesale distributors page, and shippers running plants alongside their freight operation can see the production view on our Power BI for manufacturing and logistics page. Groups that also run their own tractors and drivers rather than buying capacity will find the carrier side — revenue and cost per mile, deadhead, profit per truck and driver turnover — on our Power BI for trucking companies page, and those whose asset side runs on McLeod can read how LoadMaster Enterprise and PowerBroker data is extracted on our McLeod Software Power BI dashboard page. Forwarders and 3PLs based around the Hartsfield-Jackson cargo ramps can see how the same engagement is delivered on Eastern-time hours on our Power BI consultant Atlanta page. Contact is form-only: send your request and we reply with a scope estimate.
business days, typical
hours, never expire
own everything
Hours deduct only for work you approve, and unused hours stay banked for the next request. See Flex pricing →
How it works
Tell us your branch structure, your job types and charge codes, and the reports you need. We agree the definitions — what counts as revenue, how disbursements and agent splits are treated — and reply with a scope, an hours estimate, and the confirmed access route before any work begins.
A senior US-based engineer sets up the extract, builds the semantic model and the DAX, and reconciles every total against your own reports, so operations and finance trust the numbers before launch. Most focused builds land in 3–5 business days.
We publish to your workspace, schedule the refresh with the open-job window reloaded each run, add row-level security by branch where you need it, and hand over the file and credentials. You own it; we maintain it from your banked hours.
Representative perspective
We knew what a job made once it closed. What we could never see was the money sitting in open files — accruals that had drifted, invoices nobody chased. Putting that on one ranked page changed what our operations meeting is about.Operations director, freight forwarder
Representative perspective
Lane pricing used to be argued from memory and a spreadsheet somebody rebuilt each quarter. Seeing revenue and margin per container by origin and destination, refreshed weekly, made those conversations short and specific.Managing director, customs brokerage
Tell us your branch structure, how your jobs are coded, and the reports you need. We'll confirm the access route, scope the task, and quote the hours before any work begins — drawn from prepaid Flex hours that never expire, with no project minimums and no obligation.
FAQ
Power BI ships no first-party CargoWise connector, so we use whichever supported route your licence and configuration allow: a replicated reporting database such as the CargoWise data warehouse or operational data store, the platform's XML integration interface, scheduled report exports, or a staging database your IT team already maintains. We confirm the route with your CargoWise administrator before any hours are used.
Yes, and it is usually the first thing we build. We report accrued cost beside supplier invoices actually posted, so open jobs show both the expected margin and how much of it is still an estimate. Jobs open past your cut-off, or where actuals have drifted from the accrual, get ranked so operations can chase them.
No. We are an independent US-based Power BI service and we claim no WiseTech Global or Microsoft partnership. We build using supported, documented interfaces to your own CargoWise data and Microsoft's Power BI platform. Our engineers are Microsoft-certified, but we never overstate the relationship with either vendor.
Yes. Multi-branch forwarders are the common case. We model your organisation structure once, agree which rate converts each foreign-currency charge line, and build margin, volume, and receivables so they roll up group-wide and drill back to a single job file. Row-level security can limit each branch to its own numbers.
Yes. Forwarders often run a separate general ledger, a CRM for the sales pipeline, or a second system inherited through an acquisition. We can model those beside the job data, provided we can read each system through a supported connection. Every source and access method is confirmed in the scope estimate before work begins.
Book a free demo
Tell us the task. We scope it, you approve, and a senior consultant delivers — typically in 3–5 business days. Prepaid hours that never expire.
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we'll reply within one business day.