Because Truckbase integrates with over 30 ELD providers, we have great flexibility should you want to switch ELD providers. Let us know when you do, and we'll be sure to update our system so you can maintain full coverage of your fleet.
Our dispatch website and driver logins are super mobile-friendly, so you can log in and track your loads and drivers can update information or attach documents from anywhere.
Yes, Truckbase is cloud-based!
While setting up we can back-fill historical data when switching software, so that you don't lose any time or data duplicating information.
Whether you have five trucks or fifty, no one has a team with excess time. Managing a growing business and balancing that with profitability means your team is virtually always at capacity, and you tend to hire when your team is over capacity. And, training new hires on your systems is a major endeavor when you’re a small business.
When done right, finding the right trucking software can be a transformative endeavor. Great software providers can open your eyes to what’s possible. There are always more efficient and effective ways to manage your business and your customers. Software, when done right, should be a huge unlocking function for your drivers, your dispatchers, your back office staff, and you as an owner.
“Truckbase is the most intuitive and easy software I’ve found after evaluating over 20 TMS providers. Any dispatcher can pick it up within 30 minutes.” -Tom Herlache, Owner of Herlache Truck Lines
But why do so many software implementations become overwhelming, time consuming, and frustrating with months of training?
At Truckbase, we have always aspired to build the easiest-to-use TMS for small trucking companies. Period. We serve growing fleets that have a minimum of five trucks and span upwards of fifty. We believe great software lies in the art of balancing powerful features with simplicity.
Because Truckbase was specifically built with (and for) small family-run fleets, we believe advanced features are only as useful as they are usable for busy dispatchers and operations managers. After all, software is meant to save time (not add more work to your plate).
Trucking software often becomes too complex to use for several reasons:
You are too busy, and your customers and team members are too important, to be spending countless hours implementing, learning, and operating in clunky software. Focus on prioritizing ease of use when selecting trucking dispatch software for your growing fleet has cascading benefits.
For any growing trucking company, endless check calls are often considered a necessary evil. They eat up your dispatcher's time, and your drivers can’t stand them. While there are valid reasons for frequent check calls (and they help build trust with brokers), there is a better way.
Twenty years ago, this would all have to be done manually, and the only way to solve it would be to add dispatchers, which reduces your profitability and doesn’t scale well. In today’s world, it is possible to reduce your dispatcher’s workload by 30% and eliminate check calls entirely through live tracking software and automation.
“Truckbase has exponentially increased our back office efficiency. They’ve helped us streamline our processes as we evolve from a company with just a couple trucks into a larger organization.” -Bruce P., VP Bumpa & Sons Trucking
Check calls refer to calls and emails from a freight broker to a carrier looking for status updates on a load. For larger fleets with dedicated dispatchers, these calls and emails will often go to the dispatcher who then needs to call or text the driver. The broker can have a range of questions: Where is the driver? Have they been loaded? What is the ETA for the load? Can you send the bill of lading?
While some brokers will only make 1-2 calls a day, there are some agents who have been known to ask for updates every 15-30 minutes. This eats into your dispatchers’ valuable time.
When your tool of choice is the phone or two-way radio, you are limited by time. A check that reveals no issues is complete wasted motion. You are also more prone to miscommunication, which can lead to routing mistakes and further inefficiencies, which may in turn impact customer satisfaction. The more you can reduce the “all clear” types of back and forth, the more time you can save your dispatchers, and the more you can reduce errors, the more efficient your whole operation will be – and the happier your customers will be.
There are 4 main ways a trucking company can manage their check calls in 2023:
While ELDs and other GPS tracking systems provided a valuable first step in being able to see where a truck is, a fully featured dispatch software (or TMS) enables trucking carriers to deepen customer trust and to fully eliminate check calls through automation.
Modern trucking dispatch software solutions like Truckbase achieve this through five primary areas:
“Truckbase is the most intuitive and easy software I’ve found after evaluating over 20 TMS providers. Any dispatcher can pick it up within 30 minutes.” -Tom H, Owner of Herlache Truck Lines
A live tracking link is a unique link that you can send to your customers via email to view all relevant information on the load as well as the location of the load.
Trucking dispatch software like Truckbase provides all the relevant information and documentation your customer may want for that load in addition to the location.
The addition of the other documents provides you more control over what gets shared (e.g., stop sharing the truck location after the load has been delivered). It also provides more information than a simple GPS tracker because check calls often include additional questions, such as “is the driver loaded?” or “can you send a copy of the bill of lading?”.
With modern dispatch software solutions like Truckbase, dispatchers are able to view and access their truck location and other ELD information through their dispatch software (or TMS). The dispatcher can rest assured that they will be automatically alerted – and the driver in turn – if there are any issues that arise. Thus you can now leverage your dispatchers to do higher level human intervention that is both more stimulating and more impactful, than having them do rote checks.
When considering implementing live tracking, it’s important to think about your driver’s preferences for tracking on their phone vs. the truck. While phone-level tracking may seem simple, do they have any privacy concerns about tracking on their device? Are they comfortable with remembering to actively turn tracking on their device for every load? Are they comfortable with technology and using multiple apps on their phone when different customers request tracking through different apps?
In addition, do you wish to provide tracking to customers who don’t have a 3rd party tracking system in place?
Providing live tracking through an ELD integration with a TMS system allows you to provide more reliable tracking and simplify your driver’s experience with your technology.
Last, while some software systems only allow you to integrate with their own ELD or provide integrations with 1-2 ELDs, dispatch software like Truckbase allows you to connect with 30+ different ELD devices. This is key because it provides more optionality if you wish to change out devices in the future.
As you grow beyond solely relying on load boards and begin to have dedicated customer relationships, a dedicated customer portal serves two overarching functions: it reflects a degree of professionalism and reliability to your customers which gives them increased confidence in giving you their business, and it can dramatically reduce customer-facing calls by allowing for self-service status update checks. By providing them similar visibility into the progress, tracking, and real-time updates that your dispatchers can leverage, your customers can rest assured that all is on track and they’ll be notified instantaneously if anything is amiss. Transparency is key to building trust and deeper relationships with customers, and they don’t want to waste their time any more than you do.
Tying to the customer portal, the logical extension of real-time tracking is providing real-time updates as needed. These are tunable to the extent you would like more or fewer, positive or negative. Know where your trucks are, get updates on when the driver arrived at the shipper, is loaded, in transit, etc.
Being able to configure these updates for different customers helps with identifying issues with detention, builds customer trust, and can improve your carriers’ rating with brokers.
Similarly to customer updates, your driver updates will tend to be more frequent and more detail oriented than what your customers require. With these as well, tools like Truckbase can automatically ping your driver with relevant updates or change delivery destinations and requirements. If they need to rest to remain compliant, they can be alerted automatically.
Check calls remain a key frustration and barrier to growth for trucking companies, especially for those growing quickly. By harnessing the power of dispatch software like Truckbase and its various automations, you can meaningfully reduce check calls for your dispatchers, drivers, and customers. Improve the satisfaction of all involved, and scale your business without breaking your team.
In the long haul trucking industry, driver turnover is nearly 100% per year – meaning the average driver lasts only 12 months. While focusing on driver retention should be your top priority when you have a roster of reliable and easy-to-work with drivers, hiring will always be a critical part of the job for any growing trucking business.
In this article, we breakdown a 7-step guide across how to find, recruit, qualify, and hire the best drivers available. Importantly, we add a compliance lens to this as well, with ___ requirements you need to execute and have in place with each additional driver.
In short, here are the 8 key steps we recommend taking for hiring drivers, from the initial scorecard of the role through onboarding your driver:
In the long haul trucking industry, driver turnover is nearly 100% per year – meaning the average driver lasts only 12 months. While focusing on driver retention should be your top priority when you have a roster of reliable and easy-to-work with drivers, hiring will always be a critical part of the job for any growing trucking business.
In this article, we breakdown a 7-step guide across how to find, recruit, qualify, and hire the best drivers available. Importantly, we add a compliance lens to this as well, with ___ requirements you need to execute and have in place with each additional driver.
In short, here are the 8 key steps we recommend taking for hiring drivers, from the initial scorecard of the role through onboarding your driver:
Whether you have five trucks or fifty, no one has a team with excess time. Managing a growing business and balancing that with profitability means your team is virtually always at capacity, and you tend to hire when your team is over capacity. And, training new hires on your systems is a major endeavor when you’re a small business.
When done right, finding the right trucking software can be a transformative endeavor. Great software providers can open your eyes to what’s possible. There are always more efficient and effective ways to manage your business and your customers. Software, when done right, should be a huge unlocking function for your drivers, your dispatchers, your back office staff, and you as an owner.
“Truckbase is the most intuitive and easy software I’ve found after evaluating over 20 TMS providers. Any dispatcher can pick it up within 30 minutes.” -Tom Herlache, Owner of Herlache Truck Lines
But why do so many software implementations become overwhelming, time consuming, and frustrating with months of training?
At Truckbase, we have always aspired to build the easiest-to-use TMS for small trucking companies. Period. We serve growing fleets that have a minimum of five trucks and span upwards of fifty. We believe great software lies in the art of balancing powerful features with simplicity.
Because Truckbase was specifically built with (and for) small family-run fleets, we believe advanced features are only as useful as they are usable for busy dispatchers and operations managers. After all, software is meant to save time (not add more work to your plate).
Trucking software often becomes too complex to use for several reasons:
You are too busy, and your customers and team members are too important, to be spending countless hours implementing, learning, and operating in clunky software. Focus on prioritizing ease of use when selecting trucking dispatch software for your growing fleet has cascading benefits.
For any growing trucking company, endless check calls are often considered a necessary evil. They eat up your dispatcher's time, and your drivers can’t stand them. While there are valid reasons for frequent check calls (and they help build trust with brokers), there is a better way.
Twenty years ago, this would all have to be done manually, and the only way to solve it would be to add dispatchers, which reduces your profitability and doesn’t scale well. In today’s world, it is possible to reduce your dispatcher’s workload by 30% and eliminate check calls entirely through live tracking software and automation.
“Truckbase has exponentially increased our back office efficiency. They’ve helped us streamline our processes as we evolve from a company with just a couple trucks into a larger organization.” -Bruce P., VP Bumpa & Sons Trucking
Check calls refer to calls and emails from a freight broker to a carrier looking for status updates on a load. For larger fleets with dedicated dispatchers, these calls and emails will often go to the dispatcher who then needs to call or text the driver. The broker can have a range of questions: Where is the driver? Have they been loaded? What is the ETA for the load? Can you send the bill of lading?
While some brokers will only make 1-2 calls a day, there are some agents who have been known to ask for updates every 15-30 minutes. This eats into your dispatchers’ valuable time.
When your tool of choice is the phone or two-way radio, you are limited by time. A check that reveals no issues is complete wasted motion. You are also more prone to miscommunication, which can lead to routing mistakes and further inefficiencies, which may in turn impact customer satisfaction. The more you can reduce the “all clear” types of back and forth, the more time you can save your dispatchers, and the more you can reduce errors, the more efficient your whole operation will be – and the happier your customers will be.
There are 4 main ways a trucking company can manage their check calls in 2023:
While ELDs and other GPS tracking systems provided a valuable first step in being able to see where a truck is, a fully featured dispatch software (or TMS) enables trucking carriers to deepen customer trust and to fully eliminate check calls through automation.
Modern trucking dispatch software solutions like Truckbase achieve this through five primary areas:
“Truckbase is the most intuitive and easy software I’ve found after evaluating over 20 TMS providers. Any dispatcher can pick it up within 30 minutes.” -Tom H, Owner of Herlache Truck Lines
A live tracking link is a unique link that you can send to your customers via email to view all relevant information on the load as well as the location of the load.
Trucking dispatch software like Truckbase provides all the relevant information and documentation your customer may want for that load in addition to the location.
The addition of the other documents provides you more control over what gets shared (e.g., stop sharing the truck location after the load has been delivered). It also provides more information than a simple GPS tracker because check calls often include additional questions, such as “is the driver loaded?” or “can you send a copy of the bill of lading?”.
With modern dispatch software solutions like Truckbase, dispatchers are able to view and access their truck location and other ELD information through their dispatch software (or TMS). The dispatcher can rest assured that they will be automatically alerted – and the driver in turn – if there are any issues that arise. Thus you can now leverage your dispatchers to do higher level human intervention that is both more stimulating and more impactful, than having them do rote checks.
When considering implementing live tracking, it’s important to think about your driver’s preferences for tracking on their phone vs. the truck. While phone-level tracking may seem simple, do they have any privacy concerns about tracking on their device? Are they comfortable with remembering to actively turn tracking on their device for every load? Are they comfortable with technology and using multiple apps on their phone when different customers request tracking through different apps?
In addition, do you wish to provide tracking to customers who don’t have a 3rd party tracking system in place?
Providing live tracking through an ELD integration with a TMS system allows you to provide more reliable tracking and simplify your driver’s experience with your technology.
Last, while some software systems only allow you to integrate with their own ELD or provide integrations with 1-2 ELDs, dispatch software like Truckbase allows you to connect with 30+ different ELD devices. This is key because it provides more optionality if you wish to change out devices in the future.
As you grow beyond solely relying on load boards and begin to have dedicated customer relationships, a dedicated customer portal serves two overarching functions: it reflects a degree of professionalism and reliability to your customers which gives them increased confidence in giving you their business, and it can dramatically reduce customer-facing calls by allowing for self-service status update checks. By providing them similar visibility into the progress, tracking, and real-time updates that your dispatchers can leverage, your customers can rest assured that all is on track and they’ll be notified instantaneously if anything is amiss. Transparency is key to building trust and deeper relationships with customers, and they don’t want to waste their time any more than you do.
Tying to the customer portal, the logical extension of real-time tracking is providing real-time updates as needed. These are tunable to the extent you would like more or fewer, positive or negative. Know where your trucks are, get updates on when the driver arrived at the shipper, is loaded, in transit, etc.
Being able to configure these updates for different customers helps with identifying issues with detention, builds customer trust, and can improve your carriers’ rating with brokers.
Similarly to customer updates, your driver updates will tend to be more frequent and more detail oriented than what your customers require. With these as well, tools like Truckbase can automatically ping your driver with relevant updates or change delivery destinations and requirements. If they need to rest to remain compliant, they can be alerted automatically.
Check calls remain a key frustration and barrier to growth for trucking companies, especially for those growing quickly. By harnessing the power of dispatch software like Truckbase and its various automations, you can meaningfully reduce check calls for your dispatchers, drivers, and customers. Improve the satisfaction of all involved, and scale your business without breaking your team.
This guide outlines the process for selecting the right TMS and trucking software for your business, based on your unique needs. It’s important to keep in mind that there is no such thing as a “best” trucking software for the industry. There are various factors that make certain software options better for your fleet than others:
Typically, we see trucking organizations revolve around five core functions: customer relations (sales), dispatch, operations & finance, maintenance, and compliance. In large fleets, these tend to be distinct teams. In smaller fleets, fewer team members tend to wear multiple hats, so you might have one or two team members working on booking loads & dispatch and a few team members covering all other operations.
Regardless of your team’s size, the first critical step is to simply list the key tasks and responsibilities of each of your functions. We recommend doing this as a team, using sticky notes on a wall or making notes on a whiteboard. You often will surprise yourself with a number of gaps and areas for improvement. Even ahead of selecting software, this process can reveal eye-opening improvement areas for your team to get more efficient and be more effective in working together.
Here is a list of questions to go through while mapping out your current workflow:
If you don’t know what you’re solving for, you’re unlikely to be satisfied with a software implementation. Go through the following list and develop a short description of your goals and timeline for a software system.
Are you trying to…
Once you have identified the top 3-5 priorities, you can then start to identify solutions. We recommend writing this down in 1-2 sentences, so you have a clear sense of what your goals are.
Here are a few examples of statements of goals and how they map to potential software solutions:
“I’m looking to support our growth from 5-50 trucks, and move off of cobbled-together tools without breaking the bank or getting bogged down in a lengthy implementation process.”
“My business is increasingly based on direct relationships with customers as opposed to solely relying on load boards. I’m looking to professionalize and build trust with customers, and I want to get more dedicated lanes with a few major brokerages.”
“Manual data entry takes time away from booking loads, and duplicating data across systems means lost BOLs and loads”
“As we grow, dispatching and communicating with drivers is getting too painful. I need a system to manage it all in one place.”
It’s possible to spend over $100,000+ on trucking software if you want a highly customized suite that has enterprise features you’ll ever need and can help you scale to 500+ trucks. If you’re a smaller fleet, there are several options that are dynamic, cloud-based, and adaptable as you grow from 5 to 50 trucks and beyond.
For a few helpful lists of trucking software, here are three worth reviewing:
One thing to keep in mind is ease of use and implementation. The worst software is the one that doesn’t get used because your team can’t figure it out. For smaller fleets especially, ease of use is directly related to how successful a new software will be for your team.
As you review different trucking software providers, here are a few areas to evaluate. Keep in mind what your goals are. For the areas you’re looking to improve the most, does a specific provider have great solutions?
Here are a few features to consider for each functional area:
Dispatch
Customer engagement
Billing invoicing
Driver pay
Maintenance
Compliance
Reporting
When selecting a trucking software provider, the team you have access to is critical. Are you going to be handed off from a salesperson immediately after you sign? Have you met and vetted your account manager? Do you have access to a contact who can resolve issues as they arise?
It is crucial to ask for references and thoroughly examine customer reviews. Choosing a software provider is not just a transactional decision but a long-term investment. The best software providers treat their customers like partners.
Reviewing online feedback from other users offers a broader perspective on the provider's reputation, overall customer satisfaction, and potential challenges.
Requesting references allows you to gather valuable insights from existing clients, enabling you to assess the software's performance, ease of use, reliability, and customer service. By reaching out to references, you can gain firsthand information about the provider's responsiveness, professionalism, and their commitment to further improvements to the software.
This comprehensive evaluation of references and reviews ensures that you make an informed decision, establishing a strong foundation for a lasting partnership with a trucking software provider that aligns with your business objectives and provides ongoing support and value.