TMS for small carriers: what you need and what you don't
Most TMS products were built for brokers or for fleets with a hundred trucks. A small carrier needs five things done well and can skip the rest. Here is the list, in the order it saves you money.
1. One record per load, from rate con to paid
The rate confirmation should create the load: broker, lane, dates, rate, miles. The same record should carry the driver and truck, the status, the POD and the invoice. If you re-type a load into a spreadsheet after booking it, the system is not doing its job.
2. A board you can look at
Every driver, every load, this week, on one screen, with what is empty and what is late obvious at a glance. This is the screen the desk lives on; if it is a list of rows, people stop looking at it.
3. The driver's phone
The driver sees his load, the stops and the broker's instructions, and sends the POD from the dock with a photo. Without this, PODs sit in cabs and invoices wait.
4. Compliance on the load, not in a binder
CDL, medical card, insurance, registration: the expiration dates should be on the driver and the truck, and the system should refuse or warn when you assign an expiring driver to a load. Finding out at a shipper is expensive.
5. Invoicing and the factoring packet
Invoice, POD and rate con in one PDF, under the right authority if you run more than one, in the format your factor wants, the day the POD lands. Then days-to-pay tracked per broker, so the slow ones get flagged.
What you can skip at this size
- Brokerage modules, customer portals, EDI with shippers
- Yard management, route optimization for dozens of stops
- Anything that needs an implementation consultant
The question to ask a vendor
Has anyone at your company dispatched a truck? A TMS built by people who have never booked a load shows it in a hundred small ways: the rate con is an attachment instead of the load, the POD is a document type instead of a status, the driver app is an afterthought. Ask to see a live load on their own operation, not a demo database.
IULink TMS is the system our own dispatch desk runs three carrier authorities on. It is included when we dispatch you, or licensed on its own.