Weekly Load Review Routine: A 20-Minute Sheet for Small Fleets

Why this matters. A $150 short pay is easy to chase on the day the remittance arrives. Three months later it is a search through emails, rate cons and bank lines, and nobody remembers which broker it was. Missing money is cheapest to recover the week it goes missing. A short weekly review is the habit that keeps it that way.

One question per load

The review does not rebuild your books. For each load it asks: did the money match the work? If yes, move on. If not, you now have a load number, a date and an amount to chase.

The five columns

A sixth column, Reason, comes from the remittance or call notes and closes the loop on each gap. More columns than this usually go unused.

A four-load week

Example data: four loads delivered or paid this week. Paid per mile is paid dollars divided by all miles, empties included.

Invented loads. Miles are back-calculated from the paid per mile figures for this example. Week paid per mile = $8,170 / 2,250 miles.

Billed $8,500, paid $8,170, gap $330. Two loads carry the gap: 4402 is $150 short and 4404 is $180 short. Loads 4401 and 4403 need no action. The gap is 3.9% of billed for the week, and it hides in a total that looks fine at a glance.

Every gap leaves with a name and a date

The rule that matters: a gap with no owner and no date is not a follow-up. For each gap, write the reason if you know it (a detention line cut, a lumper not added, a rate difference from the rate con). If you do not know, the reason is "ask". A remittance with a short-pay note can be compared with the rate confirmation in a few minutes, and our short pay and chargebacks guide shows how.

Post that to whoever needs to see it. It takes 1 minute and it is the record you will want when a gap repeats.

Minute by minute

Here is one way to spend the half hour. It is a suggestion, so change it to fit how your office works.

1. Minutes 1 to 5. List the week's loads from dispatch. One line each, delivered or paid this week.
2. Minutes 6 to 12. Fill billed and paid from the invoices and the bank. Add all miles from the trip record.
3. Minutes 13 to 20. Compute the gap and paid per mile. Mark every load with a gap.
4. Minutes 21 to 30. Write the reason or "ask" for each gap, assign an owner and a date, and send the weekly note.

If a step runs long, note which one. A slow step 2 usually means the bank and the invoices live in different places, which is a setup problem, not a review problem.

What the sheet feeds

• Broker conversations. If the same broker shows up in the gap column week after week, that is a pattern worth a call, and the dated lines are your evidence.
• Your rate floor. Paid per mile with empties counted shows which lanes carry the week. See the true RPM worked example.
• Your cash plan. Days from invoice to deposit are the input for the next 13 weeks.

What breaks the habit

• Too many columns. Four or five fields are enough.
• No owner. Name one person, usually whoever bills. Dispatch helps with load facts.
• Skipping clean weeks. A clean week still goes in the sheet and gives you a baseline.
• A moving day. A routine tied to a day survives busy weeks. Pick a day and keep the sheet in one shared place.

Common questions

• Do I need software for this? No. A spreadsheet works. The free audit can run the same check on your last 20 loads.
• What counts as a gap worth chasing? Any gap with no reason. Small gaps that repeat are worth more attention than one large one-off.
• Who should do it? The person who bills, with dispatch on call for load facts.
• Why count empty miles in paid per mile? Because the truck and the driver's day were spent on them. A rate that looks fine per loaded mile can be thin per mile driven.

Run a load through the load profit tool to see profit after fuel and driver pay. We can run the same check on a bigger sample: send us your last 20 loads and we will compare billed against paid for each one.