Getting started

Getting started as a receiving facility

A receiving-facility workspace is a tracking-and-appointments workspace. You can see every inbound container your carriers have shared with you, watch the vessels they are on, and answer delivery times — but you cannot review documents, dispatch trucks, or edit a shipment. This is what is actually wired up, and where it stops.

9 minute read · Updated July 27, 2026

Your appointment queue is not in the left rail.

The Delivery Appointments page works for a warehouse workspace, but no navigation entry points at it — the link is built for Importer (BCO) workspaces only. Bookmark /protected/appointments now, before you need it.

What your workspace can do

Conterminal decides what a workspace can reach from its variant, not from your role. Every warehouse workspace gets the same fixed set of permissions, and a tenant admin in a warehouse workspace has exactly the same reach as a viewer. Here is the real list.

Turned on: The container list and Container Dashboard, individual shipment pages, vessel tracking, the Companies directory, the terminal and steamship-line directory, and your own account settings.
Turned off: Document Review, express review, the dispatch workbench, the carrier scheduling board, billing, import tracker and managed tracking, tracking adapters and credentials, partner-access rules, network companies, access requests, and the admin area.

Two of these are worth calling out because they surprise people. Billing is forced off for a warehouse workspace even when your membership record grants billing access — the variant overrides the membership flag, so no Billing entry will ever appear. And the per-diem watch that drives the at-risk banner for carriers and forwarders is off, so you will not get at-risk alerts in this workspace.

If you also work in an importer or carrier workspace, those permissions travel with the workspace, not with you. Switch workspaces from the user menu at the bottom of the left rail rather than assuming a missing screen is a bug. See Why can't I see this page?

Where you land and what the rail shows

Signing in drops you on /protected/operations/dashboard — the Container Dashboard. That is the landing path for the warehouse variant specifically; the shipment-status list that importers and forwarders land on redirects here instead, so /protected/operations and /protected/operations/dashboard are the same destination for you.

The left rail has exactly three rows, in one unlabeled group:

Container Dashboard: Your landing page. Stays highlighted on both /protected/operations/dashboard and /protected/operations/reporting, which are the same screen.
Vessel Tracking: Opens /protected/operations/on-water.
Scheduling: Greyed out and not clickable. Hovering shows the tooltip “Scheduling — coming soon.” It is a placeholder — the carrier scheduling board is a carrier-only screen and is not coming to this rail.

The header navigation across the top shows Container Dashboard, Vessel Tracking, and Companies. On a phone the bottom bar adds a Home button pointing at /protected/operations/home. That page loads, but for a warehouse workspace it renders only the vessel-tracking panel — the snapshot widgets and watch list that fill it for carriers and forwarders are not built for this variant. Treat the Container Dashboard as your home screen.

Reading the Container Dashboard

The dashboard is a filterable grid of the containers your carriers have shared with you, one row per container. On a phone it is headed Container Dashboard with the line “Choose a view, then open a shipment for details.” Clicking a row opens that shipment.

What is in a row, and what is not

The warehouse column set is 34 columns wide and covers status and holds, container number, customer and broker, master bill, booking and PO references, contents, tracking number, vessel and voyage, steamship line, the trucking company, pickup and return terminals, delivery location, the ETA family (ETA, AIS ETA, steamship-line ETA), document and discharge dates, LFD, pickup and delivery appointments, gate out, delivered, gate in, LMTFD, pickup and return drivers, and the source with its last-updated timestamp. Use the column picker to hide what you do not need; your layout is saved per workspace.

Two exclusions are built into the data, not the filters. Rows still in a pending state are dropped, and standalone managed-tracking items are dropped — you see confirmed delivery orders only. Returned containers also age out: a returned row survives only while its gate-in date (or, failing that, its last source update) is inside the lookback window. Open containers are never aged out.

Saved views and My Watchlist work the same way they do elsewhere and are stored under a warehouse-specific key, so they never collide with views you saved in another workspace. See Saved views and the watchlist and Container Dashboard basics.

Export CSV downloads the rows currently visible, with your column order applied. The file is named forwarder-shipment-status-report.csv regardless of workspace variant — the contents are your warehouse rows, the filename is just wrong. Rename it after download.

There is no review queue in a warehouse workspace. If you arrive on a URL carrying a review filter it is ignored, and the review count is always zero.

Vessel tracking

Vessel Tracking shows the vessels carrying your inbound containers, with terminals and container counts. Your workspace reads the same vessel and container data an importer sees, scoped to the shipments you have access to.

Two differences from the carrier version are deliberate. Container lists load only when you open a vessel, rather than all at once, so the first paint is fast and the list appears a moment later. And the manual vessel-sync controls are hidden — you cannot force a vessel refresh from this workspace. Vessel positions and ETAs are updated for you; if one looks stale, see Vessel tracking.

Reading a shipment (read-only)

Opening a row takes you to the shipment page. You get the tracking strip at the top, the milestone panel, a Shipment Facts card, and Terminal Status when terminal data exists. 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.

Everything that writes is removed for a warehouse workspace. There is no refresh-tracking control, no tracking notes or mentions section, no miscellaneous document uploads, no rail and route plan panel, and no delivery-scheduling panel. The container is being updated for you — LongShorty signs into the terminal, rail, and steamship-line systems on your carrier's behalf and writes the milestones you are reading. You are looking at the result, not driving it.

Terminal Status names the adapter and the tracking resolution behind a milestone. When a date on this page disagrees with what the terminal website shows you, that block is the first thing to quote to your carrier — see Read a shipment page.

Responding to delivery appointments

The appointment queue lives at /protected/appointments, headed Delivery Appointments with the line “Inbound containers for your facility — respond to suggested times, book open slots, and see what’s scheduled.” It lists containers where your organization is the receiving facility and the box has neither been delivered nor returned.

Work “Needs your response” first. Each row reads like “ACME Drayage suggests Tue, Mar 4 · 08:00-12:00” with the carrier's note underneath. Accept books it immediately and returns you to the queue. When nothing is waiting the panel says “Nothing waiting on you.”
Check “Upcoming deliveries.” Confirmed appointments dated today or later, oldest first, each with its date and time window. Empty state: “No confirmed appointments yet.”
Then “Needs a delivery time.” Containers with no appointment and no pending proposal, up to thirty at a time. A chip in the header shows how many are awaiting carrier — those are times you already proposed. Empty state: “Everything has a time or a pending proposal.”
Publish your dock capacity. The My delivery slots card at the bottom lists your active locations. Per location: an Accepting appointments checkbox, day toggles Mon through Sun, From and To times, a Slot length of 30, 60, 90, or 120 minutes, and Trucks/slot. Save slots writes it and shows Saved.

If you have never been scheduled at, the slots card reads “No dock locations yet — one is created automatically the first time your carrier schedules a delivery here.” There is nothing to do; the location appears on its own.

Saving slots can quietly tighten your capacity.

When a location has no rule yet, the editor pre-fills Mon–Fri, 08:00 to 16:00, 60-minute slots, 2 trucks — those are suggestions, not what is currently published. It also replaces any stored cap of 99 or more trucks per slot with 2 in the field, so opening an unlimited location and pressing Save slots without touching anything cuts it to two trucks. Read every field before you save.

Responding from the email, with no account

When a carrier suggests a time, Conterminal emails your registered scheduling contacts from “Conterminal Dispatch” at hello@conterminal.com, subject Delivery appointment suggested · CONTAINER · date · window. The body lists Container, Deliver to, Date, Window, and any note, and carries a button labeled Respond — no login needed.

That button opens a page tied to a single-use link that is valid for fourteen days. It needs no account and no password. You get Accept this time as the primary action, and Choose another response opens Suggest a different time and Decline appointment. Countering asks for a date and a Time window typed like 08:00-12:00, plus an optional note; anything else is rejected with “Pick a date and a window like 08:00-12:00 to counter.” On success the page confirms — “Counter sent — your carrier will confirm or reply.” — and tells you it is safe to close.

The link acts for your company on that one container, and it burns on first use. Reusing it gives “This link was already used.” If two people work the same inbox, agree who answers.

These emails go only to the scheduling contacts registered for your organization. If nobody is registered, no email is sent at all — there is no fallback to your login address. If your team is not receiving suggestions, ask your carrier to confirm which addresses are on file rather than checking spam. Related: Delivery appointments.

Two gaps to know about before you rely on this

The appointments queue has no navigation entry.

The Delivery Appointments link is built only for Importer (BCO) workspaces — it is absent from the warehouse left rail, from the header navigation, and from the phone bottom bar, and it does not appear in breadcrumbs. The page itself has no variant restriction: it loads for any workspace with an active organization and scopes correctly to your facility. Typing or bookmarking /protected/appointments is the only way in.

Counter / details and Book / propose lead to a page with no scheduling panel.

Both buttons deep-link to the shipment page at the #schedule anchor. That anchor belongs to the Delivery Scheduling panel — and that panel is explicitly suppressed for warehouse workspaces. Conterminal still loads the scheduling data and still recognizes you as the receiving party; it simply does not render the card. So the link lands you mid-page on a shipment with nothing to schedule from.

The practical consequence: inside the application, Accept on the queue is the only appointment action available to you. Countering a time, declining a time, and booking a container that has no time yet all have to happen from the emailed Respond — no login needed link, or by telephoning your carrier. Do not delete those emails until the appointment is settled.

Accept can also fail silently. If the slot fills between the carrier sending the suggestion and you accepting it, the page returns to the queue with no error message — your carrier is notified, but you are not. After accepting, confirm the container actually moved into Upcoming deliveries before you plan labor around it.

What the public scheduling page does and does not do

If your carrier invited you before you had a workspace, you probably arrived through /welcome/scheduling, headed “Delivery appointments without the phone tag.” When the invite link carries the carrier's details it shows a chip like “ACME Drayage invited your company to schedule deliveries on Conterminal.”

The Get set up form asks for Company, a You are choice of Importer / BCO or Warehouse / 3PL, a work email, and optional contact name, city, and note. The button is Request scheduling access. On success the form is replaced by “Request sent.” and “Your carrier will confirm your access — the invite lands in the email you provided.”

This page creates nothing.

No account, no workspace, no login link, and no access token is created by submitting it. The form is validated and then emailed to the inviting carrier's notification inbox — or to Conterminal if the link carried no carrier — with your address as the reply-to. A human at your carrier still has to set the workspace up. If you submitted the form and nothing happened, chase your carrier, not Conterminal.

Once your workspace exists, use the Log in button in that page's header, or go straight to the sign-in page. See Signing in and finding your workspace.

Troubleshooting

I cannot find Delivery Appointments anywhere

It is not in any navigation surface for a warehouse workspace. Go to /protected/appointments directly and bookmark it. The page itself works — it is only the link that is missing.

“Counter / details” opened a shipment with no scheduling section

Expected. The scheduling panel is suppressed for warehouse workspaces, and those buttons point at its anchor. Counter or decline from the emailed “Respond — no login needed” link instead, or call your carrier.

I clicked Accept and nothing seems to have changed

Either the page had not refreshed, or the slot filled first. Reload /protected/appointments and check whether the container is now under Upcoming deliveries. If it is not, the acceptance was voided on capacity and your carrier has been told — ask for a new time.

“This link has expired”

Appointment links last fourteen days and are single-use. The suggested time may well still be open — the page tells you which one it was. Ask your carrier to resend.

“This link is not valid”

The link was mistyped, truncated by a mail client, or revoked. Copy the whole URL from the original email rather than retyping it, and if it still fails ask for a fresh one.

“That slot just filled up — suggest a different time below or contact your carrier.”

Another appointment took the last space in that window while you were reading the email. The same page lets you counter with a different time; do that rather than accepting again.

Nobody at my facility gets the appointment emails

Only registered scheduling contacts for your organization are emailed, and if none are registered nothing is sent. Ask your carrier which addresses are on file and have them corrected.

My dock hours are right but carriers still overbook

Check that Accepting appointments is ticked for that location, and that Trucks/slot is what you intend — the editor shows 2 whenever the stored cap is 99 or more, so an earlier save may have written 2 without you noticing.

A container is missing from the Container Dashboard

Rows still in a pending state and standalone managed-tracking items are excluded by design, and returned containers age out of the lookback window. If the container is open and recent, it is a sharing problem — your carrier has not linked your facility to that delivery order.

There is no Billing entry and I am a tenant admin

Billing is off for every warehouse workspace regardless of role or membership setting. This is not a permissions error and cannot be enabled from inside the workspace.

Scheduling in the left rail does nothing

It is a disabled placeholder labelled “Scheduling — coming soon.” The scheduling board it hints at is a carrier-only screen. Your scheduling work happens on /protected/appointments and in the appointment emails.

I cannot add a note or upload a document to a shipment

Correct — tracking notes, mentions, and document uploads are removed for warehouse workspaces. Send the document to your carrier and let them attach it.