Partners & access

Which company list am I looking at?

Conterminal has three different screens that list companies, and two of them are literally named Network Companies. They are not the same list, they are not filled the same way, and only one of them you can type into. This tells you which one you are on and what it can do.

8 minute read · Updated July 27, 2026

Two screens share one name.

Both /protected/admin/network-companies and /protected/admin/companies render an H1 reading Network Companies, and the navigation label for both is Network Companies too. You only ever see one of them — which one depends on your workspace type — so the fastest way to tell them apart is the eyebrow above the title. The BCO/forwarder screen says Tenant Admin; the carrier screen shows your organization name.

The three company screens and what each is for

Every workspace sees at least one company list. Which ones you see depends on your workspace type and your role, and the three differ in the one way that matters: where the rows come from.

Companies (/protected/companies): Read-only. Titled “Companies You Work With”. Rows are derived from delivery orders you actually share with another company — you cannot add, edit, or remove anything here. Open to any workspace that resolves.
Network Companies (/protected/admin/network-companies): Your workspace's own private company directory. This is the only one of the three you can type into. BCO and freight-forwarder workspaces only, and only for a tenant admin or tenant manager.
Network Companies (/protected/admin/companies): The carrier-side view of companies connected to you through delivery orders and billing configuration. Carrier workspaces with admin access only. A platform admin who opens it is redirected to /protected/platform/companies.

There is a fourth place companies appear, and it is the one most people land on by accident: the Entities console. It carries a Companies You Work With card grid built from the same derived counterparty data as /protected/companies, a Companies You Work With stat tile, and an Open company directory link at the bottom of the section that takes you to the full list. Nothing on it is editable either.

The private directory and the derived list feed each other in one direction only. Confirming a document can create a Network Companies row, and companies you share shipments with are surfaced there as Connected. But typing a company into Network Companies never puts it on /protected/companies — that list requires a real shared delivery order.

Browsing counterparties and role breakdowns

/protected/companies is a three-column table: Company, Type, and Shared Shipments. The count beside the heading reads 12 companies or 1 company, and the subtitle is “Counterparties with shared delivery orders, scoped to your workspace.” With nothing to show it reads No shared companies yet and “Once you share a delivery order with another company, they will show up here.”

The Type cell is a chip carrying the company's organization type — Beneficial Cargo Owner, Broker, Warehouse, Trucker, or Equipment Provider. Underneath it, a smaller line breaks down how that company appears on your shared shipments, for example 10 as Importer (BCO) · 4 as Warehouse. The role labels are Owner, Carrier, Customer, Importer (BCO), Broker, Freight Forwarder, and Warehouse. A company with no breakdown shows no line at all rather than a placeholder.

Why the list can be empty when you know you have partners

The page picks a lens from your workspace type and only three lenses exist: trucker, bco, and freight_forwarder. Any other workspace type — warehouse, for instance — falls through to no lens at all, and the page renders the empty state even though the workspace has plenty of shipments. On the Entities console the same condition produces a different and more honest sentence: “No delivery-order activity is visible for this workspace type.”

The empty state on /protected/companies says “Once you share a delivery order with another company, they will show up here” in both cases. If you are on a warehouse or equipment-provider workspace, that sentence is misleading — sharing more delivery orders will not populate the list, because your workspace type has no lens. Nothing is broken on your end.

One more accounting quirk worth knowing. On a trucker workspace the counts come from a source that cannot separate active shipments from total shipments, so the Entities console labels that lens with a single figure — 34 shared — while BCO and forwarder workspaces get both, as 34 shared · 9 active. Counterparties whose organizations have been deactivated or merged are dropped from the list entirely.

Reading a company profile

Clicking a company name opens its profile at /protected/companies/<slug>. Some links go through /protected/companies/resolve with an id or name parameter first; that route only looks up the slug and redirects, so a brief flash of an empty page is normal.

The header shows Conterminal> Company, the company name, then a subtitle joining the long type label, its status as Active or Inactive, and Legacy Imported when the record came from a legacy customer import. Below that:

Classification: Party Type (or “Unclassified”) and Workspace (or “No tenant workspace”, meaning the company exists as a record but nobody from it logs in to Conterminal).
Contact Information: Contact name, a mailto email link, and up to two phone numbers. Empty reads “No contact information”.
Profile Address: Street, city, state, ZIP. Empty reads “No address”. This is the profile address on the organization record, not a delivery location.
Shipment Visibility: A status chip plus Paths, Matched Jobs, and Last Update, then a row per visibility path. Display only here — the toggles live on the partner-access screen.

If you actually work with the company, a Your Shipments section lists up to 25 of your active delivery orders that involve them, each row showing container number, Terminal, and Line. The subtitle reads 9 active shared shipments, or “No active shipments right now. Showing recent shared history.” when there is nothing live. Over the cap you also get “Showing the 25 most recent”. The button underneath is View your shipments with plus the company name, and it opens a filtered reporting grid.

An About block and a Common Questions block render at the bottom only when that company has saved profile content. If the company is your own and you are its tenant admin, an Edit profile button appears top right and opens a single About textarea with a Save Profile button. Blank lines separate paragraphs; clearing it removes the About section. Nobody outside Conterminal sees this — despite what the underlying column names suggest, company profiles have no public tier today.

Company profiles are gated on a proven relationship, not on a permission you can be granted. The page returns a plain 404 both when no profile exists for that slug and when you have no shared delivery order with the company. Those two very different situations look identical from the browser, which is why the troubleshooting below starts there.

Adding a private network company

This is the BCO/forwarder screen at /protected/admin/network-companies. Five tiles across the top count Companies, Canonical, Local Only, Roles, and Archived. The filter row is Search, Role, Canonical, Show archived, and an Apply button; filters live in the URL, so a filtered view is safe to bookmark or paste to a colleague.

Search before you add. Type the company name into Search and select Apply. Set Canonical to All and Show archived to On while you check — a company you added months ago and archived will not appear otherwise, and re-adding it creates confusion later.
Fill the add form. The row of fields under the tiles is the add form: Company, Role, SCAC, Address, Email. Only Company and Role are required.
Pick the role deliberately. The choices are Carrier, Importer (BCO), Logistics Provider, and Warehouse. There is no blank option, so the dropdown is already sitting on Carrier when the page loads — change it before you submit. Role is what decides which document-confirm dropdown this company later appears in, so a wrong role means an entry you cannot find when you need it.
Select Add Company. The row is created with source Manual and canonical status Local only — it belongs to your workspace and no other workspace can see it. Choosing Carrier also provisions the carrier profile that lets you dispatch against the company.

Reading the table

Columns are Company, Roles, Source, Canonical, Last Seen, Locations, and Actions. Under the company name sits its normalized name in mono capitals — that is the matching key, and it is what makes two similar spellings collapse or fail to collapse. Source is where the row came from: Manual, Document Confirm, Spreadsheet Import, Shared Shipment, Platform Seed, or Migration, and a row can carry several. Last Seen reads Not yet until the company appears on a document. With no matches you get “No network companies match these filters.” The list pages 30 rows at a time behind Load More.

Connected: The row is tied to a real Conterminal organization — usually because you share shipments with them. You get Open and Add Local Details on it, and you cannot archive it.
Local details / Local only: A record that exists only inside your workspace, typically one you typed in. You get Archive on it, and no Open button, because there is no organization to open.

Adding local details and archiving

Add Local Details is how you annotate a company you do not own the record for. Select it on a Connected row and a panel headed Add Local Details opens above the table with the company name under it. The fields are Private Name, SCAC, Address, Contact Name, Contact Email, Contact Phone, and Private Notes. Cancel returns you to the filtered list; Save Local Details saves and does the same. SCAC is upper-cased and the email is lower-cased on save, so you do not need to be careful about that.

Private Name is worth a second look. It is the name your team knows the company by, it renders under the official name in the table, and it never leaves your workspace. Neither does Private Notes. Use them for the internal shorthand you would otherwise keep in a spreadsheet.

Archiving is one-way in this screen.

Archive submits immediately with no confirmation step, and there is no unarchive button anywhere on the page. Setting Show archived to On lets you see archived rows again, but the Archive button is simply gone from them and nothing replaces it. Treat an archive as permanent from your side and contact support if you need one reversed.

A company you typed in yourself cannot be edited afterwards. The Add Local Details action is only offered on Connected rows, and the add form at the top always creates a new record rather than updating an existing one. To fix a misspelled name or a wrong role on a local-only row, archive it and add it again with the correct values.

Where these entries show up (the confirm comboboxes)

Network Companies is not a filing cabinet. On a BCO or freight-forwarder workspace it is the source list behind the company dropdowns you use when you confirm a delivery order. On a carrier workspace those same dropdowns search the shared organization catalog instead, which is why the carrier screen has no typing surface. Any other workspace type gets “Lookup not permitted for this workspace.”

The role you assigned decides which dropdown a company can be selected in. The mapping is fixed:

Carrier: Offered for the Local Carrier / trucker field. This is the role most confirm-screen entries end up with.
Importer (BCO): Offered for the importer-of-record field.
Logistics Provider: Offered for both the Broker and the Freight Forwarder fields, and for the document issuer.
Warehouse: Offered for the warehouse field, and also for the document issuer.

In Document Review the field is labeled Local Carrier (Trucker) and its placeholder is literally Search Network Companies. The forwarder Express Review table uses the same data behind a shorter Search local carrier placeholder. On the delivery-order confirm screen, the row labeled Issued To Carrier carries a required Local Carrier selector.

Each result carries a badge telling you what you are about to pick: Existing local carrier for a record already in your directory, Connected carrier for a real organization, and New local carrier for one you are creating right now. If nothing matches, the dropdown offers Add local carrier — it becomes Adding local carrier... while it works and creates the row with role Carrier and source Document Confirm. That is why unfamiliar rows appear in Network Companies after a busy confirming session; they are not seeded by anyone else.

The dropdowns return nothing at all until you type. An empty search box is not evidence that your directory is empty — it is the designed behavior. Type at least part of the name before concluding a company is missing.

Troubleshooting

A company page 404s

Two different causes produce the identical page. Either no company profile exists for that slug at all, or you have no shared delivery order with that company and are not a platform admin. Check /protected/companies first: if the company is not in that list, you have no proven relationship and the 404 is the access gate doing its job, not a broken link. If the company IS in the list and the link still 404s, the profile record is missing — send support the company name.

“No shared companies yet” on a workspace with shipments

The directory only builds a list for trucker, BCO, and freight-forwarder workspace types. Every other workspace type — warehouse, for example — renders the empty state permanently, regardless of how many delivery orders you have. Confirm your workspace type on the Entities console: the eyebrow beside your organization name names the lens, and it is absent when no lens applies.

The company is in Network Companies but not in the confirm dropdown

Check its Roles column. A company saved as Warehouse will never be offered for the Local Carrier field, and a company saved as Carrier will never be offered for Broker. Because the add form defaults to Carrier with no blank option, a wrong role is easy to submit by accident. Also confirm the row is not archived — set Show archived to On to check — and remember the dropdown returns nothing until you type.

I cannot find a company I know I added

Set Canonical to All and Show archived to On, then search on a distinctive fragment rather than the full legal name. The list matches on the normalized name shown in mono capitals under each company, so “ABC Trucking, Inc.” and “ABC Trucking Inc” may not sit together. If it still does not appear, it was created against a different workspace.

There is no Archive button on a row

Archive is only offered on local-only rows that are not already archived. A row badged Connected is tied to a real organization and cannot be archived from this screen — the relationship comes from shared shipments, so removing it here would not be truthful. Use the partner-access controls to change what that company can see instead.

There is no Add Local Details link on a row

That action exists only on Connected rows. A local-only company you typed in has no organization behind it to annotate, and the screen offers no way to edit it. Archive it and add it again with the values you want.

Submitting the add form throws an error page

The form has no inline validation, so a failure replaces the screen rather than marking a field. “Company name is required.” means the Company box was blank or whitespace. “Choose a valid company role.” means the Role value did not survive submission — reload and try again. Anything starting “Could not save network company:” or “Could not sync carrier profile:” is a server-side failure; go back, reload the page, and check whether the row was created before you retry, so you do not create a duplicate.

“Lookup not permitted for this workspace.”

The company lookup behind the confirm dropdowns only serves carrier, BCO, and freight-forwarder workspaces. Any other workspace type gets this message. It is a workspace-type restriction, not a role or permission you can be granted.

The Network Companies screen is not in my navigation

It is offered only to BCO and freight-forwarder workspaces, and only to a tenant admin or tenant manager. Carrier workspaces get the different Network Companies screen at /protected/admin/companies, which requires carrier admin access. Everyone else gets neither.

The carrier company list says “No connected companies found”

The full text is “Add a company or adjust the filters to review carrier connections.” Clear the search box and set the role and billing selects back to Any role and Any billing before concluding the list is empty — the filters persist in the URL, so a link someone sent you may already be filtered down to nothing.

Two companies on my list look like duplicates

Compare the normalized names in mono capitals and the Source column. One row sourced Manual and one sourced Shared Shipment usually means you typed in a company you were already connected to. Keep the Connected row, add your private name and notes to it through Add Local Details, and archive the manual duplicate.