Watch the full walkthrough. It covers everything from picking a trailer to handing your driver a finished loading PDF. Rather read? The whole script is below, broken into six short chapters.
Here's the narration from the video, tidied up for reading. Six chapters. Skip ahead to whatever you need.
If you've ever tried to plan a trailer load with a forklift in one hand and a calculator in the other, this walkthrough is for you.
PalletPlan is a 3D loading planner. Instead of working out what fits where, and in what order, on paper, you sort it out on screen in a few clicks. Build a load, optimize it, then hand the driver a PDF. That's the whole job, and the chapters below walk through each step.
Everything starts with the trailer. In the sidebar, open the Trailer dropdown and pick whatever is pulling out of your yard. Normal, Mega, Jumbo and Frigo cover every European standard, alongside 20- and 40-foot containers and the 40-foot high-cube. Each preset comes pre-loaded with the correct interior dimensions, so there's no digging through a spec sheet.
Running something non-standard? Choose Custom and type in your length, width and height in millimetres. The 3D scene rebuilds itself instantly, so what you see on screen is exactly what your driver pulls up to the dock.
With the trailer set, start adding freight. In the Add Pallet panel, pick a preset: EUR at 1200 × 800 mm, FIN at 1200 × 1000 mm, or Custom for anything in between. Set the height, then the quantity. You can add up to 100 pallets at once.
Then there's the Client field. Type in a company name and that client gets its own color automatically. Once the trailer fills up, you can tell at a glance whose freight is whose, without labels or a separate spreadsheet.
The Stackable checkbox tells the planner what can ride on top of what. Turn it off for fragile electronics. Turn it on for bulk crates. Changed your mind later? Click any placed pallet and flip the setting in the panel that opens.
Hit Add to Plan, then do the same for the rest of your freight. Everything shows up in the sidebar, grouped by client and color-coded, with a running count at the top. The Client Groups legend at the bottom shows how much of the load belongs to each customer.
Here's where it gets interesting. There are three ways to build a load.
The first is manual. Grab a pallet from the sidebar, drag it onto the trailer, and drop it where you want. Use Grid-Snap (50 mm) when you want clean alignment, or Free Placement when you need to nudge into a tight spot. R rotates, Delete removes, Ctrl-Z undoes. The same shortcuts you already use everywhere else.
The second is automatic. Hit Optimize Loading and the planner packs the whole trailer in seconds. Three switches let you steer it. Delivery order lets you drag your stops into the right sequence, with stop #1 nearest the rear doors, so freight comes off in order at each drop. Cluster pallets by client keeps each customer's freight together for unloading. Same-client stacks only makes sure one customer's pallets never end up on top of another's.
The third is a mix of both, and it's the part everyone asks about. Say you've already placed half the load by hand, with the fragile pallets up by the cab and the heavy stuff back by the doors. You want the algorithm to handle everything else without disturbing any of that. Click Optimize and choose "Keep placed pallets." It locks what you've already set and optimizes around it. The pallets you placed stay exactly where you put them, and the planner fills in the rest around them.
If something doesn't fit, you'll know right away. An amber alert slides in listing exactly which pallets were left behind, and those rows pulse in the sidebar so they're easy to spot. Dismiss it once you've decided what to do.
When the load looks right, hit Export PDF. Your driver or warehouse crew gets a single page with what they need to load the trailer. At the top is a diagram of the trailer seen from above, with the cab outlined so it's clear which end is which, and every pallet drawn to scale and color-coded by client. Next to it are the numbers that matter: utilization percentage, linear deck metres, and total pallet count.
Below the diagram is the manifest, listing each pallet's client, dimensions, and whether it stacks. Print it, email it, or drop it on the warehouse tablet, whatever suits your routine. If you just need a quick picture for a message or a customer email, there's an Export PNG option too.
The last piece is saving your work. The top bar has three buttons: Save, Load, and New. Save stamps your plan with a timestamp and keeps it in your browser. Load brings back anything you've worked on before, so you can pick one from the list, see its pallet count, and carry on where you left off. New clears everything for the next load.
The app also autosaves every 30 seconds. Close the tab, quit the browser, even lose power, and your work is still there when you come back. Need to plan a second trailer at the same time? Open PalletPlan in a fresh tab. Every plan you've saved is right there.
That's the whole tool. Open a trailer, drag in your pallets, run the optimizer, and print the manifest. What used to take an afternoon of guesswork now takes a few minutes, and the driver leaves the yard knowing exactly where every pallet goes.
The walkthrough takes three minutes. Setting up your pallet library and trailer fleet takes about twenty. Start the trial and load a real trailer today.