Negative Rates

You can create a negative rate to represent a negative charge for a condition or option within a tariff service.

For example: Some carriers give incentives for shipping outside of their peak times.

For negative rates to work correctly, you must specify a negative amount in all of the following areas:

• at the Condition / Option level, the Minimum Charge field must contain a value that is a negative amount
• at the Rate Code level, the Minimum Charge field must contain a value that is a negative amount
• at the Rate Code level, the Rate Range table for the Condition / Option must contain a negative Rate

Transportation Manager will enforce the more restrictive of the two minimum charges mentioned above.

For example: If the negative charge at the condition level is -$100 and the negative charge at the rate code level is -$150, Transportation Manager will only allow only negative calculations to -$100.

Note that the total cost of rating the service cannot be negative or zero, otherwise the tariff service will fail during rating. The end sum of the conditions/options must be a positive value, as the intent is to allow a negative condition/option within a service to cancel out a positive condition/option.

Rating sequence is crucial to achieving an accurate calculation. Positive charges must supersede negative charges.

For example: Consider the following three charges:

• WGT (weight-based charge),
• WGT1 (negative rate), and
• FREIGHT (uses WGT condition as input value and is a positive charge that would be a portion of the WGT charge),

These three charges should be sequenced as follows: WGT, FREIGHT, and WGT1. If they were instead sequenced as WGT, WGT1, and FREIGHT or WGT1, WGT, and FREIGHT, the two weight conditions / options might cancel each other out leaving the system unable to calculate a charge for the FREIGHT condition / option.