Tracking & visibility

Read a shipment page

Every shipment in Conterminal lives at the same URL — /protected/operations/<id> — but the page you get is decided by your workspace, not by the shipment. Four meaningfully different pages ship from that one route. This is how to tell them apart, read the facts without guessing at their source, and find the action you came for.

10 minute read · Updated July 27, 2026

The URL is not the page.

Two people can open the exact same link and see different cards, different facts, and different menu items. Nothing is hidden from you because of the shipment's state — it is hidden because of the workspace you are signed in to. If a colleague describes a button you cannot find, check which workspace they are in before you check the shipment.

The four versions of this page and how to tell which you are on

When you open a shipment, Conterminal resolves your active workspace first and then routes you. A carrier workspace gets the carrier page. An importer/BCO, freight-forwarder, or warehouse workspace gets the tenant page — which itself renders one of three layouts depending on what the ID turns out to be and who you are. Any other workspace is sent to /protected/unauthorized without rendering anything.

The fastest tell is the Actions menu. Open it and read the bottom.

Version	How you know
Carrier	The Actions button carries a chevron, and the menu contains Edit Job Shell, Print POD, Upload POD, and View History. Below the header you get Scheduling, Billing Customers, Accessorials, per-leg route blocks, and a Parties card.
Importer/BCO	A single Shipment Facts card, then Documents, DO Enrichment, Confirmation History, and — if you can confirm — Submit Confirmation. The menu has no page-type label at the bottom.
Forwarder (networked)	The Actions menu ends with a small grey NETWORKED TRACKING label. A Forwarded Source or Delivery Order Source card may sit above the facts. No Documents or Confirmation cards.
Managed tracking	The Actions menu ends with MANAGED TRACKING and offers Edit Tracking and Linked Shipment. Shipment Facts includes Booking, Container Carrier, Carrier Source, and Source — fields that exist nowhere else.

A warehouse workspace gets a fifth, deliberately stripped view: the same tenant layout with no Actions menu at all, no notes, no documents, and no confirmation cards. If your Actions button is simply absent rather than empty, you are in a warehouse workspace.

One redirect surprises people. In a forwarder workspace, opening a managed tracking item that already has a confirmed link to a delivery order sends you to that delivery order's page instead. The URL in your address bar changes. That is not an error — the linked shipment is the canonical record once the link is confirmed.

The header and lifecycle strip

The header title is the container number. If no container number is recorded yet, it reads Shipment — that is a real state, not a loading placeholder. Under the title sit the party pairs, and they are merged when two roles are the same company: you get one Importer (BCO) line when the ocean importer and the deliver-to are the same name, and separate Ocean Importer (BCO) and Deliver To lines when they are not. The same merge applies to Forwarder / Broker.

To the right of the parties are five fixed metadata fields — PO, Bill of Lading (B/L), Seal #, Commodity, and Size / Type — plus a stage chip, a hot-load chip when the shipment is marked, and a clearance badge when a hold is active. When a house bill differs from the master bill, it appears as a second line under the B/L rather than as its own field.

The stage chip shows At Terminal even when the container is actually available for pickup. Availability is treated as a readiness overlay, not a lifecycle stage, so the chip stays anchored to the stage. Read Availability in the facts grid or Terminal Status card — never the chip — to decide whether you can send a truck.

Scroll down and a compact sticky header pins under the navigation bar with the container number, the terminal, the deliver-to, the stage chip, and a three-dot Actions button labelled Open actions menu. It is the same menu, not a reduced one.

Reading the strip

The lifecycle strip is five cells across the top of the media panel, and each label flips from forward-looking to past tense as the milestone lands:

On Water: The vessel. While sailing it shows the ETA facts stacked — SSL ETA first when the carrier gave one, then the winning AIS, terminal, or DO ETA. Once discharged it settles to the arrival date labelled Arrived or Unloaded.
Arriving At → At Terminal: The pickup terminal. The meta lines under it carry the LFD with a lateness badge, a Good Through date, the hold label, and Appointment: with the date and · #number.
Trucker → Gate Out: Your carrier. The action link is View EIR once one exists, or Upload EIR after gate-out when it does not.
Deliver To → Delivered: The consignee, with its street address underneath. The action link is View POD once a delivery receipt is attached.
Empty Returning To → Returned: The return terminal, with LMTFD and its badge. A red Termination badge appears when the empty return is a termination rather than a normal street turn.

A sixth Review cell is inserted between the terminal and gate-out cells when the shipment has an active off-site review segment. The deadline badges read 3 Days Left, Due Today, On Time, or 2 Days Late, and the late ones are tinted.

The facts grid and where each fact came from

On the importer/BCO and forwarder pages, Shipment Facts carries Status, Broker Ref, Clearance, Tracking Number, Bill of Lading (B/L), Pickup Location, Delivery Location, Terminal, Vessel Steamship Line (SSL), Container Steamship Line (SSL), Container BIC, Container Steamship Line Source, Vessel, ETA, Dispatch Date, Pickup Date, Delivery Date, and Return Date. Those are delivery-order fields: they came from the parsed document or from someone editing the record.

The managed tracking page uses a different grid — Booking, Bill of Lading (B/L), PO, Container Carrier, Carrier Source, Steamship Line / Operator, Pickup Terminal, Return Terminal, Vessel, Vessel Identity, Voyage, ETA, Discharge, Gate Out, Delivered, Returned, Terminal Status, Availability, Last Free Day, Appointment, Local Carrier, and Source. The bottom half of that list is telemetry, not paperwork.

The fields that lie if you misread them

Container Steamship Line Source / Carrier Source: How Conterminal decided which line owns the box. Manual Override means a person set it. B/L Prefix and BIC Prefix mean it was inferred from the bill of lading or the container prefix. Unresolved means nothing decided it — treat the line name beside it as unconfirmed.
Terminal Status: The terminal adapter's own status text, passed through verbatim by LongShorty. When there is no terminal reading at all, this falls back to a Conterminal enrollment message about tracking, which is not a terminal statement.
Availability: Available or Not Available, straight from the terminal adapter. Blank or Unknown means the terminal has not answered — it does not mean Not Available.
Last Free Day: The terminal's LFD when LongShorty has one; only when it does not does the stored delivery-order LFD show through. The two can disagree, and the terminal wins.
Appointment: Rendered as the date, then · # and the appointment number. A date with no number means the terminal reported a slot but no confirmation reference.
Source (managed only): How the tracking record got created: Email Forward, PDF Upload, CSV Upload, XLSX Upload, or Manual. Managed Tracking means the origin was not recorded.

A dash means no value is stored. It does not mean zero, and it does not mean the field was checked and came back empty. Terminal and vessel names render as links when they resolve to a known Conterminal terminal or vessel page, and as plain text when they do not — an unlinked terminal name is a hint that the name has not been matched to reference data.

Facts that LongShorty maintains are updated by the worker that signs in to terminal, rail, and steamship-line systems on your behalf. Rail milestones reach the page from a direct CSX adapter, from SSL sources such as ONE and Maersk, and from BNSF and CN credentials you supply. Nothing on this page is parsed from your PDFs by LongShorty — document parsing is a separate pipeline, and it is what fills the delivery-order half of the grid.

Terminal status and holds

The Terminal Status card is the rawest view of what the terminal said. It carries Tracking Resolution, Tracking Status, Adapter, Availability, Terminal Status, Last Free Day, Appointment Date, Appointment Number, Yard Location, Terminal, Discharge Port, and Holds. A Delivery Type field appears only when the adapter is octopi.

Availability here is explicit about ignorance: it reads Unknown when the terminal returned no answer, and Available or Not Available otherwise.

“Clear” in the Holds field is weaker than it looks.

The Holds value is built by listing only the hold flags whose value came back exactly true. Everything else — a hold object with no true flags, and an entirely absent hold record — renders the same word: Clear. So “Clear” means “no flag came back held,” not “the terminal confirmed there are no holds.” If a terminal portal is telling your driver about a hold that Conterminal calls Clear, believe the terminal, refresh, and check the Adapter and Tracking Status fields on this same card before escalating.

Separately from the terminal's own hold flags, the shipment carries a clearance status shown as a badge in the header and as Clearance in the facts grid: Clear, Customs Hold, Terminal Hold, or Freight Hold. A dispatcher's manual override wins over whatever the provider reported, so the badge you see may be a human judgement rather than a terminal reading.

On a forwarder networked page the Terminal Status card is suppressed whenever the rich media panel is present, because the same telemetry is rendered inside the stage panel. If you want the flat field list, look at the shipment from the importer/BCO side.

Documents and media

The large panel under the header is stage media. What renders depends on where the box is: a vessel map and voyage calls on water; the terminal's cameras, address, and routing facts at the terminal; the gate-out EIR; the delivery POD; then the return terminal. Notes and miscellaneous documents are threaded into that same panel rather than living in their own card — see notes and @mentions for how they work.

The importer/BCO page also has a fixed Documents card with exactly four slots. They do not grow and you cannot rename them:

Outbound TIR: Terminal Interchange Receipt (pickup).
Delivery Receipt: Proof of delivery.
Inbound TIR: Terminal Interchange Receipt (return).
Return Receipt: Empty return confirmation.

Each empty slot offers an optional Document date (optional) field and a Click to upload target that accepts PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF. A filled slot offers View and Delete.

Below that, DO Enrichment lists the delivery-order documents that have been ingested against this shipment. On the tenant pages it is read-only — the Attach PDF button is deliberately not rendered there. Carriers upload from the Actions menu instead, using Upload POD, Upload Pickup EIR, Upload Return EIR, and Replace DO, and print with Print POD or Print Signed POD.

Actions available to you

Four menu items are on every version of this page: Add to My Watchlist (which becomes Remove from My Watchlist), Add Note, Add Misc Documents, and a change-history item. Everything else is conditional.

Carrier menu: Mark Hot Load (which sticks as “Hot Load marked” and disables), Edit Job Shell, the document action — Confirm DO, Open DO PDF, or Upload PDF depending on state — Delivery Order Details, Replace DO, Print POD, Print Signed POD, Upload POD, Upload Pickup EIR, Upload Return EIR, View History, and Billing for admins and managers.
Tenant and managed menus: Mark Hot Load, Edit Tracking for forwarder admins and managers, Change History, Source, Linked Shipment on a managed item, per-document replacement uploads, and the page-type label. Refreshing LongShorty is a separate chip beside the menu, not an item inside it.

Two carrier items are restricted to tenant admins on an active shipment: Deactivate No-Work / No Pickup, and Deactivate Duplicate Shell, which additionally requires the shipment to have been created natively rather than imported. Both are destructive and both are rendered in red. A tenant admin also gets Run One-Time LongShorty Sync and Turn Tracking Off For This Shell / Turn Tracking On For This Shell.

The refresh chip reports back in place. While it runs you get Waiting for LongShorty to start and then Syncing with LongShorty with an elapsed counter. On success it holds Last synced just now for a minute, or Checked just now, no newer terminal data when the run found nothing new — that second message is a successful check, not a failure. A failed run reads Terminal check failed. When the shipment is not actively tracked, the quiet label reads Waiting for LongShorty sync or LongShorty not tracking.

Editing: confirm workspace vs job-shell override sheet vs tenant edit form

Three different screens edit shipment data, and they are not substitutes for one another.

The confirm workspace. Reached from Confirm DO in the carrier Actions menu, which only appears while a delivery-order document is still pending confirmation. It opens a dedicated route with the source PDF beside the fields so you can check every value against the paper. Once the document is confirmed the route stops offering the form and shows the confirmed stage instead. See confirming a delivery order.
The job-shell override sheet. Opened from Edit Job Shell, a side sheet titled Edit Job Shell. It is the widest editor in the product: Order Basics (Container Number, Broker Reference, Purchase Order (PO), Pickup Number, Tracking Number, Seal Number); Billing Customers; Route, Schedule & Status — including Status Override, Hot Load, ETA, Dispatch Date, Pickup Date, Gate Out Date and Time, Delivery Date, and Gate In Date and Time; Shipment Details; Assignments; Notes & Clearance; Container Steamship Line (SSL); and LongShorty Tracking. The Billing Customers group renders only for users who can manage billing — everyone else sees the sheet without it.
The tenant edit form. A full-page form at /protected/operations/<id>/edit, headed Edit Delivery Order, with the line “Editing scope for this session:” followed by your role. It ends in Save Changes and Cancel. It requires write access on that specific shipment; a collaborator has no editable fields at all and is bounced straight back to the shipment page.

Carriers cannot open the edit form; tenants cannot use the override sheet

These two editors do not overlap, and neither one is discoverable.

A carrier workspace that navigates to /protected/operations/<id>/edit is redirected to /protected/unauthorized — the edit form is not available to carriers at all, however senior the role. Conversely, the tenant Actions menu is built without an Edit Job Shell item, so importer/BCO and forwarder users cannot reach the override sheet by any route. Do not spend time hunting for either one from the wrong side.

There is a second, sharper edge here: nothing anywhere in Conterminal links to the tenant edit form. No button on the shipment page, no row action in the container list. The only way in is to type the /edit URL onto the end of the shipment address yourself. If someone in your organization told you “just click Edit,” they were either on a different page or working from memory of the URL.

What each role may change on that form is fixed by role rather than by screen. Tenant admins, managers, and users share essentially the same editable field list; only a tenant admin may also reassign the broker and forwarder, and only admins and managers may set the shell-level billed parties.

Superseded shipments

When a delivery order is replaced, the old record is marked superseded and points at its replacement. Old links keep circulating in email long after that happens, so the two page versions handle them very differently.

On the carrier page: The old ID resolves through to the canonical record and an orange Superseded Delivery Order strip appears at the top, naming the tracking number, container, and BOL you asked for, plus when it was superseded and the canonical ID. An Open Canonical URL button takes you to the clean address. The cards below are already showing the canonical shipment.
On the tenant pages: No follow-through and no notice. The importer/BCO, forwarder, and managed pages load exactly the ID in the URL. A superseded ID that you can still read renders as an ordinary shipment; one you cannot read is simply not found.

If a tenant colleague and a carrier colleague open the same old link and describe different shipments, this is why. The carrier was silently forwarded to the replacement; the tenant was not. Before you reconcile numbers across a shared link, confirm nobody is reading a superseded record.

One more asymmetry in the same area: the carrier page also accepts an old numeric ID and resolves it to the current shipment. The tenant pages require a proper UUID and will not find anything for a numeric one.

Troubleshooting

You land on /protected/unauthorized

Your active workspace is not permitted on this route. That is a workspace problem, not a shipment problem — switch workspaces and try the same link again. Carriers also get this from the /edit URL specifically, which is expected.

The page says the shipment was not found

On the tenant pages this usually means the ID in the URL is not a UUID, is superseded, or is not readable by your organization. Search for the container number instead of reusing the link, and open the shipment from the result.

Cards keep appearing for several seconds after load

Normal. The header and lifecycle strip render first, then the media panel, then scheduling, billing, accessorials, route legs, and parties stream in behind them. Grey pulsing blocks are placeholders holding the right amount of space, not errors.

“Tracking Paused: Identity Conflict”

LongShorty saw the same tracking identity claimed two ways and stopped rather than guess; the strip ends with “LongShorty paused this tracking identity; no automatic correction was applied.” The refresh chip is disabled and the sync label reads “Paused: identity conflict.” Resolve the conflict from the buttons in the strip — refreshing will not clear it.

“Pickup Terminal Mismatch Review”

The stored pickup terminal and the terminal LongShorty is tracking at disagree. Choose Apply LongShorty Terminal to accept the tracked terminal, or Dismiss / Keep SQL to keep the stored one. The strip shows how many times the mismatch was detected and when it was last seen.

“LongShorty Subject Ambiguity”

Multiple candidate tracked subjects matched this delivery order, so terminal telemetry is withheld from the authoritative cards until ownership is trusted again. Facts that look stale here are being suppressed on purpose; do not paper over them by editing the shipment.

“LongShorty Tracking Needs Repair”

Same-container tracked subjects exist but none holds an active canonical link, so terminal tracking stays withheld until ownership is repaired. This needs a tracking fix, not a data entry fix.

Availability is blank but the box is on the ground

Blank means the terminal has not answered, not that the container is unavailable. Refresh LongShorty, then check the Adapter and Tracking Status fields on the Terminal Status card to see whether that terminal is being polled at all.

Holds says Clear but the terminal disagrees

Clear only means no hold flag came back true, including the case where no hold record was returned. Trust the terminal portal, refresh, and raise it with support with the container number and the adapter name from the Terminal Status card.

Change History will not open

On a managed tracking item the item is disabled until a tracked container exists. If it opens but fails, it reports “Could not load change history.” — close and reopen the menu, which refetches.

The Terminal Status card is missing entirely

On a forwarder networked page it is suppressed whenever the media panel is present. The same values are in the stage panel and in the Shipment Facts grid.

“Operation shell not synced yet.”

The Billing Customers card has no operation shell to read from, so freight and accessorial billed parties cannot be shown. Charges generated before the shell exists will not know who to bill — raise it rather than adding charges over it.