A
Accessorial
Additional shipment-related service or charge beyond the basics of moving cargo from origin to destination. Accessorials could be related to special equipment usage, state tolls, overtime, or liftgate.
Artifact
An entity representing a coherent piece of data with a type and format. Example artifact types include bill of lading, invoice, and delivery receipt. Example artifact formats include PDF, JSON, JPEG. Raw input data received from external systems is first saved as artifacts prior to further processing. Loop uses the term "artifact" rather than "document" because sometimes data is received as PDFs files and other times the same data is received as an API response, and "artifact" works well for both use cases.
Artifact extraction
The process of extracting semi-structured key-value pairs of data from unstructured artifacts. It is part of the broader artifact ingestion process.
Artifact ingestion
The overall process of Loop receiving data and storing it as Loop entities. It includes several subprocesses.
B
Bill of lading (BOL)
An artifact that includes shipment details such as the shipper, consignee, cargo description, and carrier. It can also be referred to as BoL, BL or B/L. Loop only identifies and marks true BOLs.
C
Carrier
A mover of cargo. In Loop, carriers are represented as organizations.
Consignee
A receiver of cargo. A consignee is a counterparty to a shipper. In Loop, consignees are represented as organizations. An organization may act as a consignee on some shipments and a shipper on other shipments.
Consignor
Another word for shipper. Loop uses "shipper" rather than "consignor."
E
EIN - Employer Identification Number
Also known as a federal tax identification number, and is used to identify a business entity
F
Factoring
A financial service for carriers in which they get paid immediately for freight invoices instead of waiting for 30-, 60-, or 90-day terms from their shippers. It improves working capital at the expense of a percentage of the invoiced total.
For benefit of (FBO)
An indication that an account is held for the benefit of another person or organization. It may appear in many types of financial and legal documents. In logistics, it generally indicates that an intermediary such as a factoring company or freight audit and pay firm is involved in a transaction.
Full truckload (FTL)
A trucking service that involves dedicated use of a semi-trailer. Often FTL is used for cargo volumes that are too large to ship with LTL, but it is not required to use the full container. Sometimes FTL is referred to as "truckload" or "TL", but Loop uses "FTL".
G
General ledger code (GL code)
In accounting, a general ledger code is an identifier used to categorize types of financial transactions. Often a GL code has a name and numeric component, with the numbers following a standard schema. "GL 231100055 - Inbound Freight, Bloomington Facility" is an example of this in which the leading "2" indicates expense, the "311" indicates the Bloomington Facility, and the "055" represents inbound freight. Different organizations use different coding standards.
I
Invoice
A request for money for provided services. Within Loop, there are two separate entities: a receivable invoice and a payable invoice.
L
Less-than-truckload (LTL)
A trucking service for the movement of cargo larger than a parcel but smaller than a full truckload.
N
Normalization
The process of creating and updating Loop entities based on ingested data. It is part of the broader artifact ingestion process.
P
Payee
A receiver of money. A payee is a counterparty to a payor.
Payment
An entity representing a transfer of money initiated by Loop.
Payor
A sender of money. A payor is a counterparty to a payee.
Payable invoice
An entity representing an invoice from the accounts payable perspective. Includes a total amount, line items with descriptions and amounts, a payor, and a payee.
Payable Invoice Review Status
Fully Approved, the invoice was approved in full (total approved amount = total invoice amount)
Partially Approved, the invoice was partially approved
Rejected, the invoice was approved for $0
Review Incomplete, the invoice has not been approved
Proof of delivery (POD)
An artifact proving that cargo has been delivered. In FTL and LTL, it is typically a copy of the bill of lading signed by the consignee. In parcel, it could be a photo of the delivered cargo.
R
Receivable invoice
An entity representing an invoice from the accounts receivable perspective. Includes a total amount, line items with descriptions and amounts, a payor, and a payee.
S
Shipment
An entity representing a set of logistics activities. A shipment has a list of reference numbers and a list of shipment jobs. The Loop platform is flexible about what a shipment means. Shipments may involve multiple transportation modes, shippers, consignees, origins, and destinations. Most of the data is stored on shipment jobs rather than on shipments themselves.
Shipment Audit Status
In Progress, the audit is moving through the extraction and audit process
Published, the extraction and audit have been completed
Shipment Billing Status
Billing Incomplete
Shipment contains any payable invoice that has not been reviewed; this will either need to be manually approved or will be auto-approved once extraction/audit is completed.
Shipment contains any payable invoice that has not been reviewed due to variance outside of the set amount; this shipment will also appear in billing incomplete until the user manually approves or a new audit is completed and is within the variance threshold.
Billing Complete
Shipment contains payable invoices that are all reviewed. Extraction and audit have been completed / no action is needed from the user
Shipment job
An entity representing a subset of logistics activity within a shipment. For example, a cross-border trucking shipment from Monterrey to Chicago might involve three separate jobs: an FTL job from Monterrey to Laredo, a cross-border transload job at a warehouse in Laredo, and an FTL trucking job from Laredo to Chicago. Within Loop, the granularity of jobs is based on auditability: each independently auditable unit is represented as its own job.
Shipment job type
A type of shipment job such as FTL, LTL, or parcel. The type determines the shape of data associated with the job. For example, FTL shipment jobs support multi-stop with multiple origins and destinations, while LTL shipment jobs are single origin and single destination.
Shipper
A sender of cargo. A shipper is a counterparty to a consignee. In Loop, shippers are represented as organizations. Similar to the term carrier, this term is used in two ways:
The first way is to identify an organization that typically acts as a shipper on shipment jobs, treating it as a fixed attribute of the organization. This is especially common in domestic FTL, LTL, and parcel shipping, where the shipper is often the bill-to organization and the direct customer of the carrier.
The second way is to identify the role an organization plays in a particular shipment job.
T
TIN - Taxpayer Identification Number
An identification number used by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the administration of tax laws. Carriers must provide their TIN when onboarding with Loop.