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Bill of lading templates

Design the bill of lading your crews have signed — block by block, for each service, move type and estimate type — and choose which bill long-distance jobs use.

4 min readChecked November 5, 2026
Owner & admin

Settings › Documents & bill of lading › Bill of lading is where you design the bill of lading (the contract) your crew fills in and the customer signs on moving day.

Before you start

Anyone who can open Settings can change it. Each template has its own Save.

Long-distance bill of lading

The card at the top decides which one bill a long-distance job shows — on the crew's phone, in the office, on the customer's portal and in the PDFs:

  • Use our bill of lading — long-distance jobs use your own templates below, like every other job.
  • Use MoveBoard's federal long-distance bill of lading — a bill built for the federal rules (49 CFR 375.505): scale weights and the weight ticket, re-weigh, services ordered and performed, valuation, the re-rate on the actual weight, what may be collected at delivery, and the pickup and delivery signatures. Your templates' terms and conditions are printed with it.

Under it, a checklist shows what the federal rules need that your long-distance template doesn't carry (On your template when it does). It's for your information. Save the choice with its own Save. See Long-distance bill of lading.

Your templates

Templates are tabs across the top (drag a tab to reorder). Add New Bill of Lading makes one; Add a page adds a further page.

For the chosen template:

  1. Name it. Preview (the eye) shows it as the customer will; Back Side edits the printed back side.
  2. Choose its Service type, Move Type and Estimate type — a job uses the template that matches it.
  3. Drag blocks in from the palette on the right (or click them): Company Information, Address, Estimated Charges, Labor Charges, Material, Packing and Unpacking, Additional Services, Declaration of Value, Storage Options, Cost Breakdown, Local Hourly Rate Confirmation, Summary of Actual Charges, Terms and Conditions, Rich Text Editor, Small Header, Final Signatures.
  4. On each block: Edit block (its words, Insert a variable…, and Fields the crew fills in), Size (Full width / Half width), Edit Signatures, or Remove block. Drag a block by its handle to move it.
  5. Press Save.

The blocks are drawn live with a sample local move, so you see what the crew will see.

A Declaration of Value block dragged in starts with standard wording: your company name, the protection options you offer (the Valuation options variable — the same A, B and C the crew's Option list offers, with the titles and explanations from Settings › Pricing & calculator › Valuation), and the usual exclusions. Change the words with Edit block. Blocks already in your templates keep their own words — if an older template still has placeholder text in this block, edit it there.

Saving a change writes a new version of the template. Orders already signed, or started on the old one, keep the version they were signed on.

Delete template removes the chosen template after asking.

Start a block on a new page

A page can hold several forms one after another — for example a damage report, a release form and an acknowledgment, each in its own block. To print each form on its own sheet, tick Start on a new page on the block's toolbar (to the right of Edit Signatures) for every block that begins a new form, then press Save. A dashed New page in the PDF line shows above each ticked block.

When the contract is downloaded as a PDF (DOWNLOAD PDF on the crew's bill) and in the copy filed when it is submitted, a ticked block starts a new sheet and its table rows, pictures and signature or initials boxes are never cut in half. Nothing else adds a sheet, so the PDF has as few pages as it can. Blocks that aren't ticked print exactly as before.

Extra pages that weren't filled in

A template made only of your own words — an agreement or a form with signature spots written into it, such as a MOVING SERVICES AGREEMENT — is an extra page of the bill. It goes into the PDF (the copy filed when the bill is submitted, the customer's email, DOWNLOAD PDF and the customer portal) only when it was filled in on the job: one of its signatures was given or one of its fields was typed. Left blank, it is left out; the crew still sees it on the bill. To make an extra page part of every bill, open Edit Signatures on its block, switch Optional off for its signature and press Save: the bill then can't be submitted until that signature is given.

Also used by

The same designer builds the Storage agreement. How the bill behaves on the job — labor hours, signatures, payments — is set on Bill of lading rules and Payments on the bill of lading.

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