Stop typing bank lines into your books.

The wedge — what every other freight TMS still makes a human do

Pull up the bank tab of any LoadStop, Tai, McLeod, Rose Rocket, or Truckstop install. The reconciliation screen still assumes the bookkeeper will sit there and type. Match this ACH credit to that invoice. Split this factoring deposit across three loads. Cross-walk this carrier wire against the rate confirmation in a different system. Then do it again tomorrow.

The math is brutal. A 200-load-a-month brokerage runs roughly 400 inbound credits a month (shipper remittance + factoring advances + reserve releases) and 200 outbound carrier payments. That's 600+ bank lines a month, each one a 30-90 second cross-reference job. Twelve to twenty hours of bookkeeper time, every month, on work that should never have left the bank line.

Keelway eliminates the cross-reference entirely. Plaid feeds the bank lines in. Keelway matches them against the load + invoice + factoring ledger before the bookkeeper opens the tab. The bookkeeper sees a Cleared queue and an Exceptions queue — everything else is already on the keel.

How the Plaid link is wired

One-time connect. You hit Connect bank, Plaid opens your bank's own OAuth screen, you log in on the bank's domain, you grant read-only access to the transactions stream. Keelway never touches the credentials. The feed starts inside two minutes — the prior 24 months of transactions backfill in the first hour so historical reconciliation isn't a separate project.

• Scope is read-only. We request only thetransactions Plaid scope. We cannot move money, change wire instructions, or initiate ACH. Outbound payments stay inside your bank's own bill-pay or your factoring portal.
• Multi-account. Operating, payroll, factoring reserve, escrow — link as many as the brokerage uses. Each account routes to its own ledger inside Keelway.
• Bank coverage. Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citi, US Bank, PNC, Truist, Capital One, Fifth Third, Regions, BMO, TD, plus the modern small-business stack — Mercury, Relay, Bluevine, Brex, Live Oak. If your bank shows up in Venmo, it shows up here.
• Revocable. You can drop the link from your bank's dashboard or from Keelway settings. The feed dies within minutes; matched history stays in your ledger.

Rate cons stop being PDFs you drag across screens

Every booking comes with a rate confirmation — the carrier-or-broker-signed PDF that says "here's the load, here's the rate, here's the pickup window." Keelway extracts it into a structured invoice line the moment it lands. The carrier name, MC#, lane, equipment, rate, accessorials, pickup and delivery windows, reference numbers, and special instructions come out as fields — not as a PDF you have to read into a TMS form.

Drop a rate-con PDF into Keelway directly, forward it from your dispatch inbox, or let our email triage pull it out of the attached carrier reply automatically. Every field carries a confidence score. Anything under 0.9 drops into a one-click review row. Production accuracy stays above 95% on the freight PDFs we've seen — and the model learns each brokerage's carrier corpus week-over-week.

Two-sided story — broker and carrier, same primitive

The AP-automation primitive is symmetric. Same engine, different ledger:

• Broker side. Incoming shipper remittance matches to AR invoices. Outgoing carrier pay matches to AP bills. Factoring is a wash — you don't factor as a broker, your carriers do. Bookkeeping is shipper-AR-heavy.
• Carrier side. Incoming broker remittance and factoring advances match to your AR. Outbound fuel-card settlements (Fleet One, EFS, Comdata), toll passes (Bestpass, PrePass), insurance debits, and IFTA filings match to the load they ran under. Bookkeeping is fuel-and-factoring-heavy.
• Carrier-broker hybrids. Asset-based 3PLs that broker spillover and own trucks: run both ledgers in the same tenant. Inter-company moves (where you broker a load to your own carrier arm) reconcile against themselves and don't show up as cash events.

What the bookkeeper's month-end actually looks like

Day 28 of the month, the bookkeeper opens Keelway, opens the Exceptions queue, sees nine items — three ACH credits with ambiguous descriptors, two factoring chargebacks that need a human read, one duplicate carrier payment to claw back, three partial-payment splits to confirm. Twenty minutes of decisions. Hits close.

Day 30, the financial-reporting feed (revenue by week, AR aging, per-broker GP, per-driver margin) is already live — there's no nightly batch to run, no spreadsheet to assemble, no cross-walk between the TMS report and the QuickBooks export. The CPA gets a clean trial balance on the first business day of the next month. The bookkeeper gets their afternoons back.

Why competitors don't do this

LoadStop, Tai, McLeod, Rose Rocket, Truckstop — they all bolted AR/AP onto a load-management TMS that was originally a dispatch tool. The accounting module is a screen, not a primitive. The assumption is still that a human sits there and types bank lines. Drumkit and a few other AI add-ons cover rate-con extraction but stop at the carrier-email boundary — they don't cross into the bank feed.

Keelway treats the bank feed and the rate-con corpus as first-class inputs, the same way the carrier inbox is. Plaid link is a one-time setup. Rate-con extraction is automatic on every booking. The bookkeeper's job changes shape — from data-entry to exception-handling — without changing the chart of accounts.