Quote freight, book pallets and crates, arrange pickups and follow Purolator Freight tracking from the warehouse system that already holds the order.
Purolator Freight carries pallets, crates and oversized consignments, so a booking needs the piece count, the packaging and the freight class before a rate is meaningful. Softpal takes those details from your order entry or warehouse system, sends them to the Purolator Freight API, and keeps the resulting load visible through pickup, terminal transfer and delivery. Freight management system integration is not a nice-to-have here; it is what stops a load being quoted from a spreadsheet that was correct three days ago.
LTL freight has its own paperwork and its own questions about where a load is. These are the parts of the process the API takes over.
A freight booking carries more than an address and a postcode. Piece count, packaging type and freight class all change the rate, and those fields travel with the booking instead of being agreed by email. Purolator Freight returns the rate and the consignment number, and the shipping paperwork is produced from the same record.
Loads get cancelled: a customer pulls out, a shipment is consolidated with another, or the goods are not ready. The booking can be cancelled from the same screen while collection is still cancellable, which matters because a terminal pickup that has already been scheduled cannot simply be forgotten.
The events that matter for freight are pickup, arrival at a terminal, departure and delivery, and Purolator Freight tracking data covers exactly those. They are attached to the load in Softpal, so a customer asking where a pallet is gets the terminal detail rather than a parcel-style in-transit message.
Freight status tends to be polled rather than pushed, and the interval deserves some thought. Terminals generate very little new information between scans, so frequent polling across every open load generates a lot of calls for very little change. The frequency is set to match the freight desk's actual needs.
Each Purolator Freight account brings its own rate agreement, account code and pickup details, and the integration is configured around the accounts you hold. Class-based rating and the accessorials that apply to a load, such as liftgate delivery or an appointment requirement, are set per account.
Consolidating several orders into one shipment is normal in freight, and the integration keeps the load linked to the orders inside it, so nothing gets separated at the terminal. Where a consignment has to be booked by hand, manual booking stays available for unusual packaging or a constrained delivery window.
The fetch rate is the gap between API calls to Purolator Freight. Every five minutes suits an active freight desk; hourly suits scheduled, lower-volume shipments. Requests can also be triggered by an event, a new booking or a status change, rather than repeating on a timer.
A pickup request tells Purolator Freight that a load is ready at an address and needs collecting. Sending it through the API keeps the request attached to the booking, so the terminal and the dispatch record agree on what was included and when collection was asked for.
The delivery estimate is returned after collection. Freight transit depends on the distance between terminals, the service selected and how the freight class affects handling, and none of that is settled before the load is in the carrier's hands.
Cross-border freight adds export documentation and customs brokerage, and the requirements vary by origin and destination. Booking through the API means those documents are generated alongside the load rather than chased afterwards, and tracking continues through clearance instead of stopping at the departure country.
Freight invoices are worth matching carefully. Comparing the charges in accounts payable against Purolator Freight's statements, line by line, is how accessorial fees, detention and class discrepancies get caught, and the comparison becomes repeatable when the data arrives through the API.
More than one Purolator Freight account can be active at a time, with the account chosen by rule. Weight slabs are one option, splitting consignments under 5 kg from heavier loads, and regional accounts are another, with a default account covering anything that matches no specific rule.
