Freight brokerages reporting — frequently asked questions
What Power BI reports does a freight brokerage need?
The set that covers the business end to end: load margin (gross margin % and $ per load, and where margin goes negative), agent and rep economics (who produces house margin versus who just moves volume), lane and customer profitability (which lanes and shippers actually pay, by rate-per-mile and margin %), carrier cost and cash cycle (buy-rate creep, accessorial leakage, and days-to-pay versus days-to-collect), and volume and concentration (over-reliance on one customer, carrier, or lane). Each is available here as a template you can clone.
Do these work with McLeod, Tai, AscendTMS, Aljex, or Turvo data?
Yes. You export your loads, quotes, carrier costs, and invoices from whatever TMS you run — McLeod LoadMaster / PowerBroker, Tai, AscendTMS, Aljex, or Turvo — plus AR/AP from QuickBooks, and the template models it into a Power BI report. The samples here use synthetic data so you can see the finished shape before bringing your own.
Is any real customer, carrier, or financial data used in these templates?
No. Every report on these pages is built from realistic but entirely synthetic data — generic customer and carrier labels, anonymized lanes, and made-up dollar figures. There are no real loads, rates, or accounts. When you build your own version, you bring your own TMS export.
How do I turn one of these into my own report?
Click 'Use this as a template' on any report. You'll describe the report (or upload your own CSV export from your TMS or QuickBooks), we read and model the data, and you get a fully built Power BI project — a .pbip you open in Power BI Desktop — back in minutes.