Who sends it
Sent by the shipper or broker (the party with freight) to the carrier (the party with trucks). It is an inbound message from the carrier’s point of view.
When it fires
At the very start of a load. The 204 arrives before the carrier has committed; the carrier reviews it and responds with a 990 to accept, decline, or accept conditionally.
What it carries
- A shipment identifier and purpose (new tender, change, or cancellation).
- Stops in sequence — pickup and delivery locations, with dates and appointment windows.
- Equipment type and any special requirements (temperature, hazmat, team).
- Weight, piece or pallet count, and commodity description.
- Reference numbers — PO, BOL, shipment, and the shipper’s or broker’s load number.
- Rate and charge information, where the partner includes it.
Where it breaks
- A tender that fails to parse — usually a malformed envelope or an unexpected segment — never reaches the carrier’s queue and has to be reprocessed once corrected.
- Missing or ambiguous stop data (no appointment window, an address that will not geocode) turns an automated tender into a manual phone call.
- A change or cancellation 204 that arrives after the carrier has already dispatched the load, forcing a manual reconciliation.
How Trailflow handles it
Trailflow EDI (beta) ingests inbound 204s, shows them in a tender queue with lane, equipment, and reference context, and — on acceptance — creates or updates the load in dispatch so the details are not re-keyed. A 204 that errors on parse can be reprocessed from its raw content after the issue is fixed.
See Trailflow EDI for the product. It is in beta; supported behavior may change.