January 2025 Product Roundup: Track by Bill of Lading

We’re kicking off 2025 with a major improvement to freight tracking and a host of improvements that make it even easier to transition away from your Excel or Google Docs tracking spreadsheets. 

Keep reading for a full rundown of what’s new in Beacon this month…

Track by Master Bill of Lading (MBOL)

In addition to tracking by container, air waybill or license plate number, you can now enter a Master Bill of Lading (MBOL) number to track all associated shipments in your Beacon portal. 

One of our most requested features, you can now start tracking earlier in the process, even before containers are assigned. MBOL tracking also helps keep your visibility data clean by ensuring that you don’t accidentally pick up milestones from past or future container journeys. 

Bill of lading details can be added during the add shipment flow, either by uploading a spreadsheet or copying and pasting the BoL number(s). After adding a BoL, all associated containers will start tracking. 

Improved Master Data Overview 

Managing tracking spreadsheets in Excel or Google Docs is a pain, and reliance on manual updates means they are constantly at risk of being out of date. Beacon helps you make these manual spreadsheets a thing of the past. 

A new and improved ‘Orders & Shipments’ view lets you view and edit all your orders, shipments and associated data points in one place. The ability to toggle between card, table and map views makes it easy to view information in the way that best suits your needs.

Shipment tracking is supported on all plans, while order tracking is available exclusively for Business and Pro subscribers. 

New Rolling Date Range Options on Live Boards

Live Boards cater to a host of use cases ranging from improving inbound warehouse visibility to delivering real-time shipment updates to customers. 

To make them even more useful, we’ve added new rolling date range options. In addition to the existing options, you can now set dynamic filters for one and two days in the future and in the past. This makes it easier to identify shipments and POs that are about to arrive or have arrived recently. 

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