Demo checklist

Twenty questions to ask any freight software demo

Including ours. Bring this list to every vendor call — a demo that survives it is a system worth buying.

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A polished demo shows the happy path. These questions find the unhappy ones — the UIDVALIDITY reset, the misfiled scan, the webhook that silently never fired — because that is where a year of your money goes.

Days-in-stage is question 2

It is a column on our tracking board. That is why the question is on the list.

Question 12 is a feature

Draft checks against the job record, field by field — the differences are the review.

Question 17, on screen

Rotation invalidates the old secret immediately, and the panel says exactly that.

Question 18, by architecture

Every tenant is a separate database. Not a row filter — a database.

Operations

1 Show one job carrying sea, air AND land legs. Is it one record or three re-typed ones?
2 How long has this shipment sat in its current stage? Is that a column, or a calculation someone does?
3 Change a milestone. Who gets told, and how — push, or when they next look?
4 Where do house and master bills live relative to each other?
5 Filter to "everything overdue that nobody owns". Can the system even say that?

Money

6 Quote a job, win it, invoice it. How many times was the same line typed?
7 Show the margin on a live job BEFORE invoicing.
8 Is accounting double-entry inside the system, or an export to somewhere else?
9 Add a cost after invoicing. What happens to the recorded profit?
10 What does the price DO when you add ten users? (Ask for the number, not the range.)

Documents & mail

11 Upload a scanned BL. Where does it land, and who connected it to the job?
12 Approve a draft BL against the booking. What checks the consignee spelling — software or memory?
13 An arrival notice lands in a shared inbox. Show its path to a dated task.
14 Search for a document by its content, not its filename.
15 What file types will it refuse to store, and does it say why?

Trust

16 Who changed this field last? Show the answer, not the feature slide.
17 Rotate a webhook signing secret. What breaks, and does the screen say so?
18 Where is OUR data — shared tables, or a database that is ours alone?
19 Export everything. Not a report — everything. How?
20 What happens to a delivery the receiving system rejected — retried, logged, or gone?