Freight forwarders running on ERPNext hit a wall fast. ERPNext core gives you Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Delivery Notes and the Accounts module, but it has no concept of a freight job, a house bill against a master bill, a container manifest, or a charge tariff that computes selling and buying rates per teu, per kilo or per volumetric weight. Teams end up bolting the operational reality onto spreadsheets and email threads while the ERP only sees the final invoice — so job profitability, milestone status and consol allocation live outside the system your finance team trusts.

We build a proper Frappe application (its own app in the bench, installed alongside ERPNext, never a pile of Customize Form hacks) that models freight forwarding as first-class DocTypes. A Freight Job DocType carries mode (air, ocean, land), direction, incoterm, shipper/consignee, routing legs and links to the HBL/MBL documents, packages and containers. Charges are driven by a Charge Tariff and Charge child table so each cost and revenue line (freight, THC, customs, haulage, documentation) is calculated from chargeable weight, volume (CBM), container type or a flat basis — with hooks.py doc events (before_save, on_submit, validate) recomputing chargeable weight versus gross weight and enforcing that a job can't be submitted with an unbalanced cost sheet. Job costing rolls actual buying costs (from linked Purchase Invoices) against sold charges to give real-time margin per job, per consol and per customer.

Technically it fits ERPNext's grain rather than fighting it. Charges flow through to ERPNext Sales Invoice and Purchase Invoice so accounting, taxes and GL stay native and auditable. Server scripts and whitelisted Python methods (@frappe.whitelist()) expose operations like charge recalculation, HBL generation and milestone updates to the Frappe REST API for your portal, tracking page or EDI integrations. Client scripts handle the operational UX — auto-filling routing, warning on volumetric overrides, toggling FCL vs LCL fields. Milestone and multi-leg tracking uses a Shipment Milestone child table plus scheduler events (scheduler_events in hooks.py) that flag overdue ETAs and fire notifications. Role profiles and permission rules (role_profile, DocType permissions, if_owner and user-permission scoping) separate operations, documentation, sales and finance so a docs clerk can't touch buying rates.

Because it's build-to-order, nothing ships until we agree exactly what you need. We start with a scoping call, produce a written scope and data model, then build against your ERPNext version (v15 or v16), your incoterms, your tariff structure and your document templates. You get the installable app source for your build, deployment onto your bench (Frappe Cloud, self-hosted or ECOSIRE-managed), UAT on a staging site with a rollback plan, documentation, a training session and a post-go-live support window. Typical delivery is one working week from confirmed scope. The full git repository is handed over — you own the code.