How-to guides
How to screen a load opportunity and decide
Who this is for: dispatchers and owners. Time: 1–3 minutes per load.
Screening gathers everything known about a load — the money, the equipment, the broker, the market at the far end — and puts it on one screen. The decision is still yours. The system will not accept freight, quote a binding rate, or tell a broker anything is booked.
1. Open the opportunity
Load Opportunities lists everything in play. Statuses:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| New | Just arrived from a call, email, load board, or manual entry. |
| Under review | You have opened it and started working it. |
| Needs more info | Waiting on the broker for something. |
| Approved to call back | You have decided to pursue it — call the broker. |
| Rejected | Not for you. |
| Booked externally | You took it, but booked it outside the app. |
| Converted to load | It became a real load. |
| Archived | Off the board. |
2. Run the screening
Screen this load reads everything on the record and returns:
- A plain-language summary of what the load actually is.
- Risk flags — the specific things worth knowing before you call back.
- A recommendation and a recommended action.
- A confidence score. Low confidence usually means the source was thin (a garbled voicemail, a two-line email), not that the load is bad.
Screening is advisory. It has no authority to accept, decline, or commit.
3. Read the checks that run alongside it
Equipment match. The broker's stated equipment — "flatbed, tarped", "53 ft reefer", "power only" — is classified and compared against the trailers you actually own. A reefer load on a dry-van-only fleet gets flagged here rather than at the shipper's gate. If a match looks wrong, check that your trailers are entered under Trailers with their real type.
Broker authority. If the record carries an MC number, the broker's operating authority is looked up against public FMCSA records. Read the result carefully — it distinguishes three different things:
| Result | What it means |
|---|---|
| Authorized | Public record shows active brokerage authority. |
| Not authorized / out of service | The record says their authority is not active. Treat this as serious. |
| Not found, or could not check | An MC number misheard on the phone, or a lookup that failed. This is not an accusation — verify the number and try again. |
Market at delivery. What the freight market looks like where this load drops. A great rate into a dead market can be a worse week than a fair rate into a busy one.
Rate benchmark. How the offered rate compares to recent comparable lanes.
4. Price it
Run Calculate profit. See Price a load with the profit calculator for what the numbers mean. The load needs a rate and a distance first — use Calculate miles if the distance is blank.
5. Negotiate with the counter-offer tool
Before you dial, work the broker terms panel. Tick the terms the broker has actually agreed to — detention pay, a reload out of the delivery market, tarp pay — and the numbers re-price live. Nothing is saved; these stay hypothetical until the rate confirmation arrives.
Ticking the reload term is usually the big one. On a dead-end lane it removes the empty ride home entirely, which is often most of the difference between a load you decline and one you take.
Suggested replies drafts the message you would send back. Read it before you send it — it is a draft for you, not an answer to the broker.
6. Record the decision
Four buttons, and one of them must be pressed by a person:
- Approve to call back — you are pursuing it. Call the broker.
- Reject — with a reason, which feeds your broker scorecards.
- Need more info — parks it while you chase the missing piece.
- Booked externally — you took the load but booked it elsewhere.
Every decision is written to the audit log with who made it and when.
7. Convert it to a load
Once the broker confirms, use Create load from this. That opens the load record, where you assign a driver and truck and start dispatching. The opportunity, the original call or email, the screening, and the profit calculation all stay linked to the load's timeline.
Related
Still stuck?
Email support@dynamanic.io with your company name, what you did, what happened — quoting any message on screen — and when, with your timezone.