Running a carrier, in practice

Specific, operational guides — settlements, maintenance, compliance and the decisions that cost carriers money.

• Detention pay: how to actually collect it — Detention is owed more often than it is collected. What the rate confirmation must say, what proof brokers accept, and how to invoice it so it doesn't get short-paid.
• How driver settlements actually work (and where they go wrong) — A walkthrough of a real weekly driver settlement — load pay, fuel, advances, lumpers and repair splits — and the five places carriers most often lose money or trust.
• TMS pricing: why per-seat billing punishes growing carriers — Most trucking software charges per user or per truck, which quietly penalizes you for adding dispatchers or growing the fleet. A breakdown of the pricing models and what they actually cost at 10, 30 and 80 trucks.
• Choosing a TMS for a 10 to 50 truck fleet — The features that matter for small and mid-size carriers, the ones vendors oversell, and the specific questions that separate a working TMS from an expensive dispatch board.
• Lumper fees: who pays, and how to stop losing the receipts — Lumper charges are small, frequent and routinely mis-billed. Here is how to decide who pays, how to bill them back to the broker, and why the receipt matters more than the amount.
• Building a preventive maintenance program that drivers actually follow — PM intervals, what to track, why mileage beats calendar dates, and how to turn a breakdown report into a service record that tells you something a year later.
• From rate confirmation to dispatched load in one minute — Rate confirmations arrive as PDFs and get retyped into dispatch software thousands of times a year. Here is what that costs, what AI extraction gets right and wrong, and how to review it safely.
• The compliance dates that will bite you, and when to start worrying — CDL, medical cards, annual inspections, IFTA, UCR, drug testing — the recurring deadlines carriers miss, how much lead time each needs, and what actually happens when one lapses.
• Moving off spreadsheets without breaking the week — A practical migration plan for carriers running on Excel — what to import first, what to leave behind, how long to run parallel, and the mistakes that make people quit in week two.