About FreightPaperwork

FreightPaperwork publishes free freight document generators that run in your browser, plus reference guides for the paperwork around a load. Used signed out there is no account, no upload and no stored shipment data. A company that wants the site to remember its addresses can subscribe, and then it stores exactly what that company chooses to save — nothing else, and nothing by default.

Why this exists

Search for a bill of lading form and the results are all one of two things. A flat PDF you print and complete by hand, which is fine once a month and miserable four times a day. Or a template behind a signup wall, where a piece of paper costs you an email address and, on some sites, your shipment details sitting on a stranger's server.

Freight paperwork is not complicated enough to justify either. A bill of lading is about forty fields and a table. It should take a minute, produce something a driver can read at a truck stop printer, and leave no trace behind. That is the whole product idea.

How it is built

The document generation happens on your device. The forms are plain HTML; the PDF is assembled by JavaScript running in your browser, using the open source jsPDF library. There is no server-side processing step, no upload and no queue — the file is built in the tab you are looking at.

That design decision came first and shaped the rest. Used anonymously, the privacy claim is structural rather than promissory: there is no store of shipment data to breach, because none is created.

It also ruled out saved carrier lists and document history, which are genuinely useful, and that is the one place the design gave way. Companies that want them can subscribe, and then their saved parties and generated documents are kept on the server on purpose. It is opt-in and it is charged for, which felt more honest than quietly collecting the same data to sell advertising against. Everything a signed-out visitor does still touches nothing, and the privacy policy lists exactly what an account holds.

Two consequences worth knowing. The documents work offline once a page has loaded, which is more useful in a yard with bad signal than it sounds. And nothing carries over between visits, so you retype repeat consignees. We would rather be honest about that than quietly sync it somewhere.

What the documents are

Generated bills of lading are standard short-form documents: the layout carriers work from every day, with the usual incorporation clause, the shipper certification, declared value and Section 7 boxes, and three signature blocks. The long form prints the conditions of carriage on the face. The VICS layout adds the customer order block that retail distribution centers reconcile against.

They are not carrier-branded forms. FedEx Freight and several retail routing guides require their own, and the guides on this site say so rather than pretending otherwise. The output is US Letter, portrait, and laid out to survive a cheap laser printer, because that is what it will meet.

How the guides are written

The reference content follows a few rules that are easier to state than to keep.

• No invented numbers. If a statistic would strengthen a sentence but no verifiable source is at hand, the sentence gets written without it. There are no fabricated survey results, industry averages or usage figures anywhere on this site.
• No fake social proof. No testimonials, no customer logos, no "trusted by" claims, no star ratings in the markup. None of those would be real, so none of them appear.
• Citations point at sources. Where a page names a statute or regulation — the Carmack Amendment at 49 U.S.C. § 14706, the shipping paper rules in 49 CFR Part 172 — the citation is there so you can read the original, not to decorate the paragraph.
• Limitations get stated. Every tool page carries a plain note about what the document is not and which carriers will refuse it. Selling around that would generate more clicks and more angry drivers.
• Corrections are welcome. If something here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed. Freight is a field where the people using a tool usually know more than the person who wrote about it.

What this is not

Not legal advice, not a compliance service, and not a substitute for talking to your carrier. A bill of lading is a contract; how it applies to your shipment depends on your commodity, your lane, your tariff and your customer. The terms of use set that out in detail, and the privacy policy covers the data side.

How it is paid for

Two things: display advertising on the free tier, and a subscription for companies that want saved addresses, document history, sequential numbering and their logo on the paperwork. No affiliate links, no sponsored guides and no lead generation — your details are not being collected to sell, because on the free tier they are not being collected at all.

Advertising storage is switched off by default and only enabled if you accept it through the cookie banner. Declining costs you nothing: every tool and guide works identically either way.

Subscribers get no advertising, and that is not a setting that hides it — the ad code is never written into the page, so nothing is requested and no advertising cookie can be set. The cookie banner does not appear for them either, because with the tag gone there is nothing left to ask about.

What is here, and what comes next

The bill of lading tools came first because that is the document everybody needs. The rest of the paperwork around a load now sits alongside them, built the same way and each with a guide: a lumper receipt generator, a proof of delivery form, a trucking invoice, a rate confirmation template and an IFTA calculator. The full list is on the homepage generator.

What comes next is decided by what people actually ask for. If a carrier form will not work with what this produces, or a document you need every week is missing, the address below reaches somebody who will read it.

Contact

Corrections, feature requests, a carrier form that will not work with what we produce, or a question about the paperwork: hello@freightpaperwork.com. Real replies from a real person, which is a low bar that a surprising number of sites fail.