Freight Forwarding & Customs

How Bitrix24 Helps Freight Forwarders, Customs Clearance Agents and Shipping Agencies Manage Quotations, Shipment Files and Document Trails in One Platform

A quotation generated straight from the deal card in Bitrix24 · © Bitrix24

A single shipment touches a shipper, a consignee, a carrier, a trucker, a warehouse and — somewhere in the middle — a customs authority. Each of them contacts you differently. The rate request lands on WhatsApp at nine in the evening, the packing list arrives by email from an address nobody recognises, the original bill of lading comes by courier, and the query on HS classification comes as a phone call to whoever happens to be at the desk. For a forwarder or clearing agent working out of Dubai, Jebel Ali, Karachi or Colombo, the daily job is less about moving cargo than about keeping several dozen parallel paper trails straight while still quoting fast enough to win the next file.

The usual toolkit holds up until it does not: a shared mailbox, a rates spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group per client, and a folder tree on a network drive that only one person really understands. The moment a colleague is on leave and nobody can find the delivery order, the cost of that setup becomes obvious. Bitrix24 is a single workspace that puts CRM, tasks and projects, an omnichannel contact centre, document handling with e-signature, and no-code automation in one place. Here is how those pieces map onto a forwarding and clearance operation, based on what Bitrix24 documents on its own product pages.

Quotations that go out the same day, not the next

Freight is won on response time. Bitrix24's lead management collects enquiries from web forms, email, telephony and ad campaigns, applies rule-based qualification, and converts any of them into a deal that carries the client's details forward. From that deal you create an estimate in one click, with the client name, line items and deal amount already filled in; Bitrix24 notes that estimates are linked to the deal, lead, contact or company, have their own Kanban view, and can be built from saved templates with automation attached. In practice that means an air-freight quote, a sea-LCL quote and a clearance-only quote each become a template, and a glance at the estimates board tells you which rates are still open, which were accepted and which have gone quiet and need chasing.

One shipment file instead of ten email threads

The part that usually forces forwarders into bespoke software is that a shipment is not a deal. It has its own life after the sale closes. Bitrix24 handles this with Smart Process Automation, which lets you create your own CRM entity beyond leads, deals and quotes — the examples Bitrix24 gives include contractor lists and a document registry. A "Shipment" smart process can carry its own fields for job number, house and master bill of lading, container number, incoterm, ETD and ETA and declaration reference, and its own Kanban stages: booked, cargo received, documents submitted, customs cleared, delivered, invoiced. Because a smart process links to other CRM entities, calendars and tasks, that file sits beside the client record rather than in a separate system, and per-pipeline access permissions let a clearance clerk work on declarations while a sales agent only sees rates.

Every rate request in one inbox

Bitrix24's Contact Center is omnichannel by design: CRM forms, a website widget, live chat, WhatsApp and Telegram, Instagram Direct, telephony and email all arrive in the same place, and any of them can be converted into a lead. For a forwarding desk where shippers ask for rates on WhatsApp and carriers confirm bookings by email, this removes the single most common failure mode — a message that exists only on one person's phone. Conversations and calls attach to the client record, so when a consignee rings about a container sitting at the terminal, whoever answers can see the whole history instead of asking them to explain it again.

Building a no-code approval workflow in Bitrix24 RPA · © Bitrix24

Documents, approvals and signatures without the paper chase

Clearance work is document work, and most of the delay sits in getting someone to sign or approve something. Bitrix24 Sign sends a document for online signature by email, SMS or WhatsApp, and the recipient does not need a Bitrix24 account to sign it. Signing is integrated with CRM, so fields on the document can be auto-populated from the related deal, and templates can be saved and reused — which suits service agreements, credit application forms, authority letters and delivery orders. Bitrix24 states that Bitrix24 Sign is UETA and ESIGN compliant. Internally, Robotic Process Automation takes a document through approval stages, assigns tasks, sends notifications and flags an approaching deadline, built in a no-code workflow editor; Bitrix24 gives document approval, purchase requests and expense reports as typical uses. A duty-payment approval or a credit-note sign-off is exactly that shape.

Operations on a board — and in your pocket

Bitrix24's Tasks & Projects tool offers Kanban, Gantt, Scrum, calendar and simple list views, along with checklists, task templates, recurring tasks, time tracking, task reports and task automation. Clearance is checklist work by nature, so a task template that fires when a shipment reaches a stage stops anything depending on memory, and recurring tasks cover the calendar items that quietly cause problems when missed: customs guarantee renewals, carrier rate-sheet refreshes, free-zone licence checks. CoPilot, Bitrix24's built-in AI assistant, can turn a short prompt into a task description or a checklist. Because the mobile app is a full CRM rather than a read-only view — Bitrix24 lists leads, deals, invoices, payments, telephony, email, inventory and calendar on mobile — a clerk at the customs counter or a supervisor at the terminal can move a shipment stage or attach a stamped document without going back to a desk. If you also hold cargo, the inventory tools track stock across multiple warehouses with receipts, transfers, write-offs and audits.

Tasks grouped by deadline on a Kanban board, with the same view on mobile · © Bitrix24

What it costs

Bitrix24 is priced per organisation rather than per seat, which matters for forwarding businesses where a lot of occasional users need access. At the time of writing, Bitrix24's pricing page lists a Free plan for one to two users with 5 GB of storage, basic CRM and Kanban and Gantt views; Basic at US$49 per organisation per month billed annually (from US$69) for five users, adding sales pipelines, recurring deals, online payments and WhatsApp and telephony integration; Standard at US$99 per month billed annually (from US$144) for 50 users, adding unlimited leads, invoices and estimates, the web form designer and e-signature; and Professional at US$199 per month billed annually (from US$289) for 100 users, adding sales automation, RPA, analytics and task time tracking. For most forwarders the practical threshold is Standard, since estimates and e-signature live there, with Professional the step up once RPA is driving approvals. Prices change, so check the pricing page before budgeting.

Where a partner comes in

Bitrix24 ships the building blocks; it does not ship your job numbering, your trade lanes or your document checklist. The work that decides whether the system is used or quietly abandoned is the configuration — defining the shipment smart process and its fields, laying out stages that match how your operations team actually thinks, connecting the WhatsApp number everyone already uses, writing the approval workflows, setting permissions per desk, and migrating the client list without losing history. That is the part B24 Biz Solutions does. As an official Bitrix24 partner based in Dubai, we configure Bitrix24 around existing operations for businesses across the UAE, the wider Middle East and South Asia, then train the people who have to live in it every day.