Quote the truck off what's packed.
Open the gig, choose SHIPPING / FREIGHT, and the request is already written: pickup, delivery, load and return dates, total weight, and how many road cases and pallets a truck has to swallow. The weight comes from the same math the load plan and the Bill of Lading run, so the number you quote and the number that rolls out the door are the same number. You review the draft and press send — nothing leaves on its own.
accommodate road cases and pallets
The weight is a number somebody typed from memory.
Booking a truck means writing the same email three times: pickup, delivery, dates, roughly this much weight, roughly this many cases. The weight is the part that hurts. Almost nobody counts the empty cases — a 4U rack can be 40 to 60 lbs before a single thing goes in it, and ten of them is a quarter-ton the driver never heard about. So the quote comes back cheap, the truck arrives too small, and the difference gets argued about on the dock.
Then there are two facts that never get written down anywhere permanent: what time the truck actually has to be there, and whether the dock has a lift gate. Both get asked by every carrier, and both get re-typed for every carrier, because the last email is the only place they were ever written down.
With GigPal PRO: the shipment block is built from the gig that's actually packed, the weight includes every case's own tare, load time and lift gate stay saved on the gig, and a second carrier costs one press instead of a retype.
From a packed gig to a carrier's inbox.
Open the gig and pick what you're asking about.
ASK FOR A QUOTE sits in a gig's MORE menu, and it opens on three scopes. FULL GIG CONTENTS sends a rental house everything on the job so they can price it against your shipping. ONLY WHAT I'M SHORT sends just the open gaps. SHIPPING / FREIGHT is the third option — it's not a rental price, it's a price to move the gear. Same modal, because renting it and shipping it are two sides of the same decision.
Nothing to ship — this gig has no gear packed yet.
The weight comes from the same math every time.
Total weight rolls up per case: the gear inside it, plus the empty case itself. That math sits in one file, and three screens read from it — the load plan, the Bill of Lading, and this one. They didn't always agree; the load plan used to silently drop the tare, so the screen you plan trucks on read light by the weight of every empty box. Fixing it in one place fixed all three at once, so a freight quote can't disagree anymore with the load plan built off the same gig.
What the truck has to carry, counted for you.
A carrier's second question is always what shape the freight is in. GigPal PRO already tells a permanent road case apart from a shrink-wrapped pallet — same flag the load plan and the Bill of Lading read — so that line is filled in for you: "3 road cases, 1 pallet — truck must accommodate road cases and pallets." Loose pieces get their own count, because a loose piece is exactly the thing a driver isn't expecting. None of it is typed twice, and none of it can drift from what's packed.
actually carries — the totals never change, only where they ride.
Add the two facts nothing else tracks.
Load time, return time, lift gate. Type them once and they're saved on the gig, so the next carrier you ask gets them without a retype. They save as you leave the field — and because it's easy to type a time and hit DONE without tabbing away, every way of closing the sheet flushes both fields first: the backdrop, Escape, hardware back, all of them. Ship-from is the one thing deliberately not saved; it's a warehouse you name fresh each time, prefilled with your company. Delivery reads the ship-to address off the gig's event details, and tells you plainly when there isn't one yet.
One carrier per press. You send it.
Every vendor in your People directory shows up in a list with their email, and each gets its own DRAFT button — a pressed one turns green and reads ✓ OPENED so you can see who you've already asked. The draft opens in your mail app, or in a browser compose tab if that's what you've set in Settings. Nothing sends automatically, ever. There is no blast-all button, on purpose: opening several compose windows back to back is unreliable across browsers, and a request nobody read is exactly what review-first exists to prevent.
Your signature is appended; your office inbox can be CC'd on every one.
The parts that keep a quote honest.
Gear plus the empty case
A road case is not free freight. Every handling unit weighs its contents plus its own tare, and that math runs from one place — the same code the load plan, the Bill of Lading and the freight quote all call. Three documents, one answer.
"≥" when the total is a floor
If any case has no empty weight on file, or any item line has no weight at all, the total is shown as a minimum with a "≥" rather than a bare figure that looks exact. A quote built on a guess should say so — the carrier is going to weigh it anyway.
Split across boxes, total unchanged
Two cases each carrying two of the same cable pool is four on the gig — and each box is weighed with what it actually holds. Declared per-case shares are honoured first, the remainder divides evenly, and the split always sums back to the line's real quantity.
Already tagged as one or the other
A pallet is assembled for one shipment; a road case is permanent. That distinction was already there for the load plan, so the truck-needs line is derived, never asked. Loose pieces are counted separately rather than folded into a case count.
The template is yours to edit
Settings holds a SHIPPING / FREIGHT QUOTE EMAIL template with its own placeholders — {shipment} drops in the whole block, plus the contact's name, the carrier, the date window and your company. Type a placeholder wrong and it's left visible rather than silently blanked, so you can see what went sideways.
It refuses to arrive cut in half
A mail-app draft is handed over through a URL, and past roughly two thousand characters the operating system truncates it silently. Rather than let a request arrive half-written, an oversized body is refused with the reason and a way out — trim the note, or switch to browser compose.
Review first, every time
The button opens a draft in your own mail — it never sends. If the browser blocks the compose window, you're told that's what happened and how to allow it, instead of being left wondering why nothing opened. Vendors with no email on file are shown, unpressable, so you know to go fix the record.
It's your signature on the email
The email carries your company name and your own signature block, and a backup office inbox can be CC'd on every one so a copy always lands somewhere the whole team checks. The name of the software you used to write it appears nowhere in it.
- The block carries
- Pickup, delivery, load date and time, return date and time, total weight, the road-case / pallet / loose-piece mix, and a plain Yes or No on lift gate — in the order a dispatcher asks for them.
- Weight math
- Contents plus container tare, per handling unit. A deliberate zero is a real weight (a soft bag can be next to nothing); only an absent weight counts as missing and turns the total into a floor.
- Saved on the gig
- Load time, return time and the lift-gate flag — reused on every later quote for that show. Ship-from is typed fresh each time and never stored, because it's a choice, not a fact about the gig.
- Refuses to
- Send anything automatically, blast every carrier at once, promise an attachment it can't produce, hand over a draft long enough to be truncated, or quote a gig with nothing packed on it.
- Goes out through
- Your default mail app or a browser compose tab, your choice in Settings. Plain text — a mail draft opened this way can't carry HTML or an embedded logo, so nothing pretends otherwise.
- Units
- Weights are stored in pounds and displayed in lbs or kg per device, so a metric-minded crew member and a US carrier read the same underlying number.
A freight request a dispatcher can quote off.
Find out what the truck really weighs.
Put weights on your cases, pack a gig, and send the same shipment to three carriers this week.
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