Techvia Blog

Every dispatcher has made this call: “Hey, just checking in, where you at?” The driver is doing 68 on I-40, hands-free isn’t always legal to answer mid-lane-change, and the answer you get is “somewhere past Amarillo, I think.” You write down a guess, hang up, and move to the next load on your board. Multiply that by every load, every four hours, every day, and you’ve built an entire job function around asking a question the truck already knows the answer to. ...

Every broker we talk to has a story. A load tenders clean, the carrier confirms, the truck shows up on the BOL, and then the freight vanishes into a re-broker chain three layers deep. By the time anyone notices, the shipper is calling about a missed delivery and the “carrier” on the RateCon isn’t the outfit that actually hauled it. Double brokering and identity theft in this industry aren’t rare edge cases anymore — they’re a cost of doing business unless your vetting process is built to catch them before the truck ever gets dispatched. ...

Detention pay is one of those line items everybody agrees should exist and almost nobody collects cleanly. The driver knows he sat three hours at a Walmart DC. The dispatcher knows it too, because the check call came in at 6:40 and the driver didn’t get loaded until almost 10. But when the invoice goes out, the detention line gets challenged, discounted, or quietly dropped because nobody can prove the clock. ...

Every carrier and broker we talk to can tell you their revenue per load. Fewer can tell you, without pulling three systems and a spreadsheet, how many days actually pass between delivery and cash landing in the bank. That gap is where the money leaks. Not in some dramatic fraud sense — in a hundred small delays, each one shaving margin off a load that already ran thin. This is the plain version of freight invoicing and settlement: what happens after the truck backs out of the dock, who touches the paperwork, and where the process breaks on a normal week, not just a bad one. ...

Every carrier office has had this argument at least once, usually right after a driver walks in waving a rate confirmation and asking why his check looks smaller than he expected. Percentage pay versus per-mile pay isn’t a philosophical debate. It’s a math problem, and most of the time the argument keeps going because nobody actually ran the numbers on the load in front of them. So let’s run them. ...

Ask five dispatchers how they calculate a driver’s settlement and you’ll get five slightly different answers, and at least one of them will be wrong in a way that costs the carrier money or the driver’s trust. We built Techvia TMS because the settlement step is where a lot of small fleets quietly bleed accuracy — not because anyone’s being careless, but because the math has more moving parts than it looks like from the outside. ...

Every carrier we’ve spoken with has the same ghost in their AR aging report: a load that delivered clean two weeks ago but hasn’t been invoiced because nobody has the paperwork. Not because the driver lost it. Because it’s sitting in a text message thread, or a photo roll, or an email that got buried under load confirmations from three other brokers. The freight moved. The cash didn’t. Why PODs Get Stuck Between the Truck and the Office The proof of delivery is the single document that turns a completed load into an invoice a customer will actually pay. Without it, most brokers and a fair number of shippers will hold the check, and they’re not wrong to. A signed POD is proof the freight arrived, in what condition, and when — and it’s usually the backstop against a shortage or damage claim showing up a month later. ...

Ask a dispatcher how their day went and you’ll usually get a laugh before an answer. Most days don’t go according to any plan they made at 6 a.m. A driver’s running late to a pickup, a broker wants a check call they already gave twenty minutes ago, and somebody’s still waiting on a rate confirmation that was supposed to go out before lunch. By the time you add it all up, dispatching isn’t one job. It’s five jobs wearing one name badge. ...

Every dispatcher who has run a board for more than a few months has a number in their head for deadhead. Most of them are wrong. Not because they’re bad at math, but because nobody sat down and worked it out from actual settlement data — they estimated it once, three years ago, and it stuck. We built Techvia TMS because the dispatchers we talk to were making load acceptance calls off gut feel and a mental average, when the real number was sitting in their own RateCons and driver settlements the whole time. Deadhead isn’t a mystery. It’s arithmetic you’re avoiding because pulling the data by hand is a pain. ...

Every broker we’ve talked to has a story about the carrier that looked fine on paper and then no-showed a pickup, or worse, ran a load without valid cargo insurance. The packet was signed. The W-9 was on file. Nobody caught the gap because nobody wrote down what “caught” actually means. This is the checklist we’d hand a new operations hire on day one — not a philosophy of vetting, just the steps in order, with the reasons attached so people don’t skip them under pressure. ...