Trips & loads
The trip record an auditor checks your log books against, and a check that runs before the truck goes.
Fleet → Trips & Loads is the record of what each load was, who took it, where it went, and when. It is deliberately not a billing system: there are no rates, customers or invoices here, because a carrier running billing software alongside this would end up with two places that disagree about what a load was worth.
What it is for is the question an auditor asks about hours of work. They do not just read your log books — they check them against your supporting documents, and trip records are the main one. A carrier with tidy logs and nothing to check them against has only half an answer.
Recording a trip
Only the trip number is worth filling in at the start; the rest can be added as the trip takes shape. Use the number that appears on your own paperwork rather than inventing one, because that is how you and an auditor refer to the same trip.
The shipping document number is the one field worth being careful with. It is also written on the driver’s daily log, and it is the thread an auditor follows from a log book to the load that produced it.
Assigning a driver, a power unit and a trailer is what makes the pre-dispatch check useful, since those are what it reads.
The check before you dispatch
Press Dispatch and the trip is checked against what you already hold: the driver’s licence and medical certificate, their dangerous goods training if the load needs it, whether they are active and recorded as qualified, and for both the unit and the trailer, the CVIP, registration, insurance, whether anything is marked out of service, and whether a service is overdue.
None of that is new information. Every one of those facts was already in this system, on a different screen. The point is that they were never in front of the person deciding to send a truck out — and somebody who has to open four screens to check four things checks them on a quiet Tuesday, not on the Friday when it matters.
A licence valid this morning that runs out on Thursday, on a trip that gets back Friday, means a driver spends Thursday driving unlicensed. A check that only looked at today would never say so. This one does, and calls it a reason to stop.
Stop, and note
Findings come in two kinds. A Stop means something that would make the trip unlawful or the vehicle prohibited — an expired licence or medical, a lapsed CVIP, registration or insurance, a unit marked out of service. A Note is worth knowing but does not make the trip illegal, such as a service your own program says is overdue or a certificate expiring shortly.
If no licence is on file, that is not evidence the driver is unlicensed — it is evidence nobody has filed it here. Those get very different words, and a blank is always a Note, never a Stop. If it were the other way round, a carrier setting up for the first time would see a Stop on every trip in their first week and learn to click past the box without reading it.
Sending it anyway
A Stop does not make dispatch impossible, it makes it deliberate. You can still send the trip, but you have to say why, and your reason is written on the trip beside the findings it answers. Software that simply refused would get worked around outside the system, where nothing is recorded at all.
What the check found is kept exactly as it stood at that moment. If the licence is renewed the following week, the trip still shows that it was expired when the truck left — because every question anyone ever asks about a dispatch is a question about what was known at the time.
Who sees what
Owners, admins, managers and investigators see every trip. A driver sees their own and nobody else’s, and cannot change them — the same shape as the log book, where the driver owns the record of what happened but not the decision to send them.
Related articles
Drivers at provincial carriers keep their duty status in the app instead of on paper, and sign each day off.
Run the facility audit on yourself: how many files an auditor would pull, which ones, and what they would find.
Declare the maintenance schedules you run, and see where every unit stands and whether its file would survive a facility audit.
What the National Safety Code expects in a driver’s file, which items are law and which are good practice, and how to record a ticket against one from a phone.