Why it exists

Quote requests used to arrive by email and by chat, each salesperson with their own format. Pricing lost half its time chasing missing data, and there was no way to know how many requests were open or where they stood.

• Capture guided by mode. Air, ocean, and ground ask different things, so the form branches: each branch asks only for what that mode needs and nothing more. Required fields are validated before it can be submitted.
• Pricing inbox with statuses. Received, acknowledged, info pending, sent, approved, rejected, expired, and converted to booking, each with its own date.
• Per-request conversation. Salesperson and Pricing talk inside the request itself, not in a separate email no one can find later.
• Quote creation in CargoWise straight from the panel, using the data already captured.

How it connects

All the integration logic lives in n8n; the browser only talks to webhooks. Requests and their history are stored in Airtable, a catalog of almost 300 organizations is read from MySQL, city lookup by postal code goes through a proxied geographic service, and quote creation is pushed to CargoWise through its integration layer.

The assistant that reads a client's email in free text and fills out the form is a language model called from n8n: the browser sends the text and gets back the JSON of fields, without knowing what's on the other side.

The quote number doesn't come back in the submission response: it arrives afterward through a callback. That's why the panel explicitly says the number appears in a few seconds, instead of pretending it's already done.

Build decisions

• Screens a role can't see are removed from the DOM, not hidden with CSS. Hiding them would leave the markup — and its content — within reach of anyone with the browser's dev tools.
• Real permission lives on the server. Data filtering is applied by the integration based on the session's email; what the browser does is the visible face of that rule, not the lock itself.
• Nothing downloads until you sign in. Not clients, not requests: no session, no data call at all.
• The message thread is tied to the request by token, so no one sees a conversation on a request that isn't theirs.
• Catalogs are closed. Unit type, packaging, container, incoterm, and customs come from fixed lists, and the available incoterms change with the mode — four of them only exist for ocean.

What's different in this demo

It's the same production file and the full flow works: a request you capture shows up in the Pricing inbox, status changes stick, the chat accumulates, and the CargoWise button returns a number a few seconds later. Everything lives in memory and is lost on reload, so every visitor starts with a clean copy.

• Any email and password gets you in, and the session opens as admin so all four screens are visible. In production there's real validation and the role decides what gets mounted.
• The assistant runs locally, with no model. It's a rules-based parser that recognizes mode, route, quantities, incoterm, hazardous cargo, and recurrence. The input/output contract is the same as the real endpoint's.
• Postal codes not in the table find nothing, on purpose, so the manual-entry path is visible too.
• Clients, contacts, salespeople, and request numbers are made up.