Spreadsheets

Most small carriers and brokerages start the same way: a spreadsheet someone built on a slow Tuesday, and it never stopped growing. Now it’s got fifteen tabs, three macros nobody remembers writing, and a driver pay formula that only works if you don’t sort column G. It’s not that spreadsheets are bad. It’s that they were never built to run dispatch for a fleet with more than a handful of trucks, and at some point the workaround cost more than the fix. ...

A 25-truck fleet sits at a crossroads. You’ve outgrown the days when you could track everything on a notepad and a few phone calls, but you’re nowhere near the size where an IT department runs an enterprise system. Success is creating its own problems. The 25-truck reality check At 25 trucks, the volume is serious. Example (illustrative numbers): if each truck averages 12 to 20 loads a month, depending on length of haul, that’s 25 × 12 = 300 to 25 × 20 = 500 loads a month. Each load carries appointments, a rate confirmation, a BOL, a POD, maybe detention, and a line on someone’s settlement. That’s thousands of pieces of information a month. ...

Most brokerages start on spreadsheets. It’s the natural first step: you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got Excel, and you’ve got a handful of shippers who trust you to move their freight. For a while, it works. Then you add more loads or a second and third person, and the wheels start to wobble in ways that don’t show up until a customer calls asking why their invoice doesn’t match the rate confirmation from three weeks ago. ...