Skip to main content
The Contract Negotiation Simulator lives under Agents → Shipping → Audits → Contract Negotiation Simulator in app.dash.fi. It’s a paired-tab surface for modeling a renegotiation and pressure-testing your carrier rates:
  • Negotiation Planner (first tab, open by default) turns your rate opportunities into a what-if renegotiation scenario with probability-adjusted savings.
  • Benchmark Ranking (second tab) compares your rates against the Dash.fi customer benchmark and ranks the top opportunities.
Both tabs are two lenses on the same carrier comparison. A single UPS / FedEx toggle at the top of the surface applies to both. Switching carriers switches both tabs at once. The default carrier is whichever one you invoice the most on.

​
Prerequisites

  • At least one parsed UPS or FedEx invoice for the carrier you’re viewing. Upload invoices under Configure → Invoices on any Shipping Agent tab. See the dashboard tour for the upload flow.
  • UPS carrier agreement (optional, UPS only). Uploading your UPS contract under Configure → Contract lets the Negotiation Planner anchor targets to numbers already in your agreement. Without a contract, the planner still runs on a generic heuristic.
Dash.fi doesn’t parse FedEx contracts today, so FedEx runs on heuristics only and doesn’t get the UPS-specific surcharge and DIM weight strategies. This limitation is called out inline on each tab’s readiness alert.

​
Negotiation Planner tab

Negotiation Planner is a what-if renegotiation calculator. It starts from the strategies Dash.fi computes for your account and lets you sweep the target rate and the probability the carrier agrees, then reads out probability-adjusted monthly, annual, and multi-year savings. Edits save automatically. Changes debounce for a moment before writing, then the server confirms with its own numbers. When your Dash.fi team edits the same plan (they and you share one plan per carrier), the hero card notes Last adjusted by your Dash team on <date>.

​
Hero card

The hero card at the top of the tab summarizes the current plan:
  • Probability-adjusted savings: total monthly savings across enabled strategies, with each strategy’s savings weighted by its own probability slider.
  • Year 1: the monthly figure annualized against your actual invoice coverage (not a flat ×12).
  • Projected (N yr): Year 1 compounded by your chosen spend-growth rate over the projection window.
  • N of M strategies active: how many strategies you’ve toggled on.

​
Global controls

Two toggle groups at the top of the tab feed the projection math:
  • If spend grows: apply flat, +15%/yr, or +30%/yr year-over-year compounding to the projection.
  • Project over: 1, 2, or 3 years.

​
Strategy cards

Each strategy renders as its own card. A card has three inputs:
  • Enable switch: toggle the strategy in or out of the total. Disabled strategies show a dimmed card and contribute $0.
  • Target: the discount, divisor, floor, or cap you want to negotiate to. Seeded with Dash.fi’s suggested goal. Edit it to model a different ask.
  • Probability the carrier agrees: a 0–100% slider (5% steps) that weights the strategy’s contribution to the hero total.
Each card also shows:
  • Current: the current value Dash.fi inferred from your invoices (a discount %, DIM divisor, or minimum charge) or the carrier’s published General Rate Increase (GRI).
  • Its own /mo savings figure, recomputed live as you edit.
  • A badge next to the title:
    • From your contract: the suggested goal came from a term parsed out of your UPS agreement that isn’t yet reflected in billing.
    • Estimate: the goal is a generic Dash.fi heuristic. Hover the badge for the exact reasoning.
Only the GRI cap card clamps its savings at zero. On every other card, a target worse than the current value produces a legitimately negative savings number, so you can see the cost of a bad ask.

​
Strategy types

Dash.fi shows a strategy only when your invoice data supports it. A strategy without enough data is left out rather than shown with a made-up number. Cards are ordered transportation first, then surcharges, then the GRI cap.
Models raising your effective discount off published transport rates. Dash.fi infers the current discount from your invoices by comparing net transport spend with the published list rate.For UPS, the goal is contract-anchored when your parsed agreement grants a better tier incentive than what’s being billed. Dash.fi uses the best tier discount on file anywhere in the contract. Otherwise, and always for FedEx, the goal is a heuristic 5-point step above your current discount, capped at 90%.The card is skipped when there are no published rates to measure against, when transport spend is too small to matter, or when you’re already discounted above 90%.
Models raising the dimensional (DIM) weight divisor your packages are billed at. A bigger divisor lowers billed dimensional weight, so a higher target is better. The current value is the spend-weighted average divisor implied by your DIM-billed packages.The goal is contract-anchored when your parsed UPS agreement has a ground or air DIM divisor higher than what’s being billed. Dash.fi picks the mode that carries most of your DIM-billed spend. Otherwise the goal is a heuristic divisor of 166, the commonly negotiated ground divisor (UPS publishes 139).The card is skipped when DIM-billed spend is under $100 per month, or when you’re already billed at or better than both the contracted divisor and the heuristic.
Models lowering the per-package minimum net charge. Dash.fi infers the floor in effect from billing: the cheapest net transport amount that repeats across at least five packages.The goal is always a heuristic 10% off the current floor, and the card always shows the Estimate badge. Contracts express minimums as a percentage off a published minimum that invoices don’t carry, so there’s no sound anchor. Minimums are among the hardest terms to move, so the default probability is lower than on other cards.The card is skipped when spend at the minimum is under $100.
One card per major UPS surcharge category with enough billed spend to matter: fuel, residential, delivery area, and large package. Dash.fi infers the current effective discount from your invoice data (net vs. gross for that category) and suggests a goal discount %.The goal is contract-anchored when Dash.fi finds a matching accessorial discount in your parsed UPS agreement that’s higher than what’s actually being billed. Otherwise the goal is a category-specific heuristic (for example, 35% for fuel, 85% for residential).Categories with less than $100 of monthly net spend, or already deeply discounted above 90%, are skipped. There’s nothing meaningful left to ask for.FedEx doesn’t get surcharge strategies. FedEx invoice data doesn’t carry a clean per-charge incentive signal, so Dash.fi has no way to infer a current surcharge discount rate.
A single card, present for both carriers, that models capping next year’s GRI pass-through. The current value is the carrier’s most recently announced GRI. The goal is a flat 1% cap.GRI cap is always heuristic. No carrier contract carries a GRI or rate-increase term, so there’s nothing to anchor against. The card always shows the Estimate badge.

​
Readiness

  • No invoices yet: if you have no completed Shipping Agent analysis, the tab shows an empty state with a Configure button that opens the invoice uploader.
  • No contract on file (UPS): the tab still renders, but every suggested goal falls back to a heuristic. The readiness alert prompts you to upload your UPS agreement so goals can be contract-anchored.
  • FedEx: the readiness alert notes that FedEx runs on heuristics only. There’s no action to take.

​
Benchmark Ranking tab

Benchmark Ranking ranks the shipping services and surcharges where you have the most room to move, measured against Dash.fi’s own customer benchmark rates. Dash.fi rebuilds the benchmarks from every connected customer’s invoice data. Each carrier + service + zone + weight combination gets three tier thresholds computed from the population of per-customer effective rates:
Where too few connected customers share a carrier + service combination to compute an honest benchmark, Dash.fi sets a stopgap benchmark rate by hand. Items backed by one of these rates show an Estimated pill next to the item name in the rate opportunities table. Hover the pill to see why. Treat the target discount and opportunity for those items as directional. When a later benchmark refresh has enough population data for that item, Dash.fi replaces the stopgap with a computed rate and the badge disappears.

​
Hero stats

Three KPIs sit at the top of the tab:
  • Spend at gold+: the percentage of your benchmarkable spend that’s already at Gold+ rates.
  • Total opportunity: annualized dollar opportunity if every ranked line moved to the Gold benchmark rate.
  • Transport vs. surcharge: the same total, split between transport charges and surcharges.

​
Rate opportunities table

Below the KPIs, a table lists the top 10 ranked opportunities (out of however many benchmarkable lines you have). Each row shows:
  • #: rank by opportunity dollar amount.
  • Item: the service or surcharge name, with a transport/surcharge type label. An Estimated pill appears next to the name when the item’s benchmark rate is a hand-set stopgap rather than computed from customer data.
  • Current disc.: your effective discount off the carrier’s published rate. Your absolute rate per pound or per shipment appears beneath it.
  • Target disc.: the discount off published rates that the Gold benchmark rate represents. The absolute Gold rate appears beneath it.
  • Opportunity: annualized savings if that line moved to the Gold benchmark rate.
  • Tier: the tier badge for the current rate: Gold+, Gold, Silver, or Bronze. Hover a badge to see which benchmark band it covers.
Reading the discount columns:
  • 0% means the line was billed at the published list rate.
  • A negative percentage means you were billed above the published rate.
  • A dash (—) means Dash.fi has no published basis to compare against. FedEx surcharges don’t carry a published rate on the invoice, so they always show a dash. Analyses run before discount percentages were introduced also show a dash.

​
Date-range filter

Use the date-range picker at the top of the tab to compare rates over a specific window (for example, a single quarter or invoice period). The picker defaults to full history. Click Full History to reset it after applying a range.

​
Readiness

If the currently selected carrier doesn’t have a parsed invoice yet, the tab shows a readiness alert with an Upload invoice action instead of the ranking. Once an invoice is parsed, the ranking appears on the next refresh. See the readiness alert notes in the dashboard tour for how these prompts behave.

​
Permissions

Read-only cardholders (users without the agent:write permission) can view both tabs but can’t edit the Negotiation Planner. Toggles, targets, sliders, and the growth/projection controls are visible but don’t save. Ask an administrator to make changes.