Carrier Onboarding
Carrier onboarding software built for freight brokers. Send one link to the carrier — back you get a verified profile, real-time FMCSA risk score, every required document, and a signed PDF that lands in your TMS by webhook.
One link out. A verified, signed carrier back.
CarrierPacket.Link is the onboarding layer freight brokers wire into their workflow when they need a carrier turned around fast — without sending faxes, without re-typing data into the TMS, and without taking a chance on whoever filled out the form. The broker creates a packet once, brands it, and shares the link by email, text, or embed. The carrier sits down with the link and finishes onboarding from a phone in their cab.
Under the hood, every submission runs through a real-time FMCSA verification via our SearchCarriers integration, a risk score with a clear PASS / WARN / FAIL verdict, an email-OTP signing step that proves the carrier controls the email they submitted, and an audit envelope baked into the signed PDF. The broker sees the result on their dashboard the moment the carrier finishes. A webhook fires into the broker's TMS. That's the whole workflow.
What gets in the way — and what we do about it
Every brokerage that runs onboarding hits the same four problems. We built CarrierPacket.Link around how to make each of them disappear, not just be tolerable.
Mid-form abandonment
A carrier opens the link in their cab on a phone, the form asks for a fax-back, or asks them to re-type 30 fields they already filled in elsewhere — and they bail. Our packet is single-flow, mobile-first, and pre-fills FMCSA data (legal name, address, equipment hints) the moment the carrier types their MC# or DOT#. Less typing means more carriers finish.
Manual document review
Reading every COI, eyeballing every effective date, filing every PDF — that's hours a week of broker labor. Our packet accepts up to six PDFs per submission (W-9, COI, Authority, References, ACH, and one custom slot), records the expiration date with each one, and stores the signed record in a hash-named path so renewal tracking and audit lookups are automatic.
Fraud surface
Cargo theft and double-brokering get harder to spot every year. We don't ask brokers to be fraud investigators on top of running freight. Every submission to CarrierPacket.Link runs through a five-layer verification stack — explained in detail below — that produces a clear PASS / WARN / FAIL verdict before you decide whether to tender a load.
Brand erosion at a vendor URL
When the carrier-facing form lives at somevendor.com, the carrier remembers the vendor, not the broker. Our packet embeds directly on the broker's site — the carrier completes onboarding at broker.com/packet, sees the broker's logo, colors, and font choices throughout, and signs an agreement on the broker's URL. The vendor stays invisible.
What CarrierPacket.Link collects and verifies
Every packet does two jobs in parallel — collect the carrier's profile and documents, and verify what's collected against public and proprietary sources. Here's the exhaustive list of what each side covers.
Collected from the carrier
- Identity: MC#, USDOT, legal name, DBA, phone, operating status
- Physical & mailing addresses (separately, so factoring and tax can route differently)
- Dispatcher details: name, email, phone, fax, URL
- Services + equipment: dry van, reefer, flatbed, power-only, etc., plus a free-text notes field
- Signer identity: full name, email, last-4 of SSN or EIN (full 9 digits hashed)
- Up to 6 documents: W-9, COI, Authority, References, ACH, plus one custom slot — each with expiration date tracked
- Signed agreement: your Broker-Carrier Agreement (or ours) accepted with an audit trail
Verified automatically
- FMCSA operating authority — Active vs. Pending vs. Out of Service, pulled at submission time
- Insurance on file — BI&PD coverage type and amount, with a federal-floor check
- Safety profile — CSA scores, OOS history, ELP / non-domicile flags
- Address spoofing — claimed location compared against FMCSA-registered state and ZIP
- Email domain health — MX records, homograph / IDN typosquatting, contact-info consistency
- Chameleon-carrier signals — phone/address shared with other DOT numbers, registration age
- Vetting + watchlist — checks against the SearchCarriers vetting feed, including known issues and watchlist alerts
Five layers between you and a bad carrier
Cargo theft and double-brokering schemes hinge on one thing: the broker treating a packet as just paperwork. CarrierPacket.Link treats every submission as a verification opportunity. Here are the five layers of protection that run on every onboarding — automatic, no extra clicks for the broker.
Real-time FMCSA verification
The moment a carrier enters their MC# or USDOT, we hit our SearchCarriers integration and pull the FMCSA record — legal name, DOT, operating status, insurance type, physical address, MCS-150 update date. The form pre-fills with the FMCSA-of-record values, so the broker can see at a glance whether what the carrier is typing matches what the federal database says.
If the carrier's authority is inactive, in revocation, or under an Out-of-Service order, the form flags it immediately. Most platforms do this lookup after submission as a back-office step. We do it during the form so the carrier can't even finish a packet with a dead MC#.
Risk scoring with a clear verdict
At submission time, every packet runs through a risk-scoring pass that hits eight data sources in parallel — six FMCSA endpoints (authority, insurance, OOS history, vetting, contact registry, MCS-150) and two contact-verification checks (email and phone). The output is a single verdict: PASS (score 80–100), WARN (50–79), or FAIL (below 50, or any hard-fail).
Hard-fails include inactive authority, missing BI&PD insurance, homograph-attack email domains, and chameleon-carrier indicators (where the same phone or address shows up on multiple DOT numbers). Soft penalties — recent contact-info changes, ELP / OOS history, address spoofing, MCS-150 overdue, insurance below the federal floor — accumulate against the score. The broker sees the verdict + the specific reasons inside their dashboard the moment the carrier submits.
Email-OTP "deferred signing"
This is the layer that catches the most obvious form of fraud — somebody filling out a packet for a real carrier using an email they don't actually own. We don't mint the cryptographic signature when the carrier hits "Submit." We send a verification email to the address they provided, and the signature is only minted when the carrier clicks the link in that email. The signing event and the email-verification event are the same event.
If the email doesn't go anywhere real, the signature never happens. If somebody else picks up the email, they have to also click the link — and that click is captured in the audit envelope. The flow is idempotent: clicks from email scanners or double-taps land on a friendly "already verified" state, no false errors. Brokers don't have to think about it; the verification is just baked in.
Optional FMCSA-phone claim for high-stakes packets
For brokerages that want a stronger identity gate — high-value loads, new lanes, after-hours sign-ups — we offer "secured" packets. In secured mode, the carrier first claims their MC# inside CarrierPacket.Link by entering it on our carrier-side login and receiving a 6-digit SMS code at the phone number FMCSA has on file. They have to enter the code before they can sign a secured packet.
It's the toughest carrier-identity check on the market and it costs the broker nothing — we just flip a flag on the packet. The carrier's claim, once verified, follows them across every secured packet they touch. One claim, every broker.
Audit envelope baked into the signed PDF
Every signed packet ships with a Certificate of Completion that includes the audit trail: when each step happened, the IP address and user-agent for each event, the OS and kernel version of the device used, the SearchCarriers risk snapshot at the moment of signing, and the cryptographic signature itself. The audit envelope is part of the legal record — not a separate file the broker has to keep track of.
If a carrier later disputes a claim, the envelope on the signed PDF is the proof. Most platforms file the audit log in their database. We file it inside the PDF the broker already has — so the proof is wherever the PDF is.
SearchCarriers powers the verification layer
Behind the real-time FMCSA lookups, the risk scoring, the insurance and contact verification, the watchlist alerts, and the vetting feed sits our data partner SearchCarriers. We don't replicate the FMCSA databases ourselves — SearchCarriers does that work, and we integrate them deeply enough that brokers experience them as a single product.
SearchCarriers provides: carrier identity (the SAFER-compatible record at MC# / DOT# lookup), risk factors (vetting, watchlist, chameleon indicators), insurance data (coverage type, amount, effective dates from BI&PD filings), contact verification (email and phone intelligence, including IDN homograph detection), and equipment image lookup for additional carrier-profile context. CarrierPacket.Link captures the SearchCarriers snapshot once at submission time and freezes it onto the carrier's profile version so it appears in the signed PDF — a permanent record of what the world looked like the moment that carrier signed.
Your brand, your forms, your rules
A carrier packet should look like it came from the broker, not from us. Every CarrierPacket.Link packet is configurable from the broker's dashboard — no support ticket, no consultant required.
Branding
Logo upload, foreground / background / contrast hex inputs, 35-font Google Fonts headline picker, and a light/dark toggle. The packet matches your site, not ours.
Form layout
Choose default lookup method (MC# vs. DOT#) and pick a 1-column or 2-column layout for the carrier-info and dispatch steps. The form adapts to how your carriers think.
Documents
Toggle each document type on or off (W-9, COI, Authority, References, ACH, plus a custom slot) so carriers only upload what your compliance posture actually requires.
Custom agreement
Upload your own Broker-Carrier Agreement PDF (up to 5 MB) — or use our default. The PDF you upload is the PDF the carrier signs, with the audit envelope appended at the end.
Per-source links
Generate a distinct URL for every source — your website, a lane-specific recruiter campaign, your factoring partner. Each link can have its own notify email, SMS, expiration date, and one-time-use toggle.
Secured mode
For high-stakes lanes, flip a packet into "secured" mode and require carriers to verify ownership of their MC# by FMCSA-registered phone SMS before they can sign.
The signed record lands in your TMS
Onboarding doesn't end on the broker's dashboard — it ends in the broker's system of record. CarrierPacket.Link fires a webhook the moment a packet is signed, with the carrier profile, every document URL, the SearchCarriers verdict, and the signed-PDF URL. Most brokers connect us to their TMS in an afternoon.
For brokers who don't run a TMS — independent agents, single-vehicle owner-operators turned brokers — we keep the signed records in the broker's CarrierPacket.Link dashboard with CSV export available any time. The data is yours, in a format every spreadsheet can read.
Common questions from brokers
How does CarrierPacket.Link prevent double-brokering?
Can I use my own Broker-Carrier Agreement?
Does the carrier-facing form actually work on a phone?
How long does onboarding actually take?
What does SearchCarriers add beyond what I can get from FMCSA directly?
Do I need a TMS to use CarrierPacket.Link?
Is the audit trail legally usable?
Onboard your next carrier today
Spin up an account, brand your first packet, and send it to the next carrier on your list — all before lunch. No procurement cycle, no per-seat pricing, no card required to start.
Try CarrierPacket.Link free