Transportation management software
A transportation management system is where a carrier keeps the load: who is hauling it, what it pays, which paperwork proves it happened and whether anyone has been paid. Most of what follows is about what that actually means day to day, and who genuinely needs it.
The five jobs it has to do
Feature lists get long. The work underneath is not, and a system that does these five without asking anyone to re-type anything is doing the job.
Booking and dispatch
A load enters once, with its rate, stops, dates and reference numbers, and every later screen reads that one record rather than a re-typed copy.
Driver and equipment records
Licences, medical cards, inspections and maintenance intervals held against the driver or the truck, with the expiry dates surfaced before they lapse rather than after.
Documents
Rate confirmations, bills of lading and proof of delivery attached to the load they belong to, because the invoice cannot go out without them.
Settlements and pay
What the driver earned on the loads they actually ran, with deductions and advances applied, produced from the same load records rather than a separate spreadsheet.
Invoicing and money in
Billing the broker or shipper, and knowing which invoices are unpaid, from the same record that dispatched the load.
Who is actually buying this
Enterprise TMS marketing tends to picture a large fleet. The federal register describes a different industry.
| Registered carriers | 2,087,001 |
|---|---|
| Authorised for hire | 1,167,225 |
| Running 1–6 trucks | 1,794,030 |
| Running 7–20 trucks | 110,926 |
Source: FMCSA motor carrier census, dataset kjg3-diqy, on data.transportation.gov. Aggregate counts, summed from the same per-state figures used on the state pages.
984,859 carriers hold for-hire authority and run six trucks or fewer. Software priced and shaped for a fleet of two hundred is not built for them — not because it lacks features, but because it assumes a dispatcher, an office and an implementation project, and they have none of those.
What to check before buying anything
- Does a load get entered once? If dispatch, settlement and invoicing each need their own copy, the system has moved the re-typing rather than removed it.
- Where does the paperwork live? Proof of delivery attached to the load is the difference between invoicing today and invoicing when someone finds the photo.
- Are the compliance dates in the same system? A medical card that expires is a truck that cannot run, and it does not announce itself.
- What happens at three trucks, and at thirty? Pricing that only makes sense at one of those sizes will eventually make the decision for you.
Tezify is a TMS built for the segment above: dispatch, compliance, maintenance and settlements in one system, free for up to three trucks. See pricing, or read what the regulations require on hours of service and inspection reports.