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What Is a Carded Terminal?
A carrier is "carded" at a terminal when it holds the credentials required to load there. The name comes from the physical access card a driver swipes at the rack.
Being carded is permission, not price. It determines whether a truck can enter and load at all — which quietly makes it one of the strongest constraints on which loads a carrier can accept.
Card-in and card-out
The rack records when a driver badges in and when they badge out. Those two timestamps are the terminal's own account of how long the truck was on site, and they appear on the paperwork.
They are useful beyond compliance: card-in to card-out is the real dwell time at a rack, which is the number that tells a dispatcher whether a terminal is worth routing through at a given hour.
Why being carded constrains the work
A load posted for pickup at a terminal is only available to carriers carded there. That is a hard filter, and it sits underneath a lot of decisions that look like something else:
- A carrier cannot simply take the best-paying load on a board; it can take the best-paying load at a rack it can enter.
- Adding a terminal is a commercial process with the supplier, not a setting. It takes time.
- Which terminals a carrier is carded at determines the lanes it can genuinely serve — and therefore what it should bother bidding on.
Carded, contracted, allocated
| Term | Answers |
|---|---|
| Carded | May this carrier physically load here? |
| Contracted | What does the buyer pay for the product? |
| Allocated | How much may the buyer lift this period? |
All three have to line up for a load to happen. A distributor with allocation at a terminal still needs a carrier carded there to move it.
How Energy Connect handles it
Terminal access is part of a carrier's profile rather than tribal knowledge, so loads surface to carriers that can actually lift them and card-in and card-out times are captured against the load itself. Terminals come from a shared master list, which is what keeps the same rack from appearing under three spellings.