Stage one: the route
A trip starts from the saved truck profile. Gross weight, axle count, height, length and hazmat status are sent to the routing provider so the returned path reflects commercial-vehicle parameters. Where a truck-aware provider verifies the result it is labelled as verified; where it does not, the label reads TRUCK ROUTE PREVIEW — NOT TRUCK-RESTRICTION VERIFIED, and the driver remains responsible for posted restrictions.
Stage two: is the load worth taking
Before acceptance the load is costed. Revenue and loaded and deadhead miles give a rate per loaded mile. Fuel is estimated from the vehicle's recorded MPG rather than a generic figure. Tolls appear when the routing provider returns them and are marked unavailable when it does not. A maintenance reserve and other operating costs come from the operator's own entries, and the result is compared against a break-even built from their historical cost basis, producing an accept or decline verdict with the arithmetic visible.
Stage three: the operating plan
The Trip Operations Plan turns the accepted load into a working document: driving hours against the 11-hour limit, the number of driving days, planned breaks, the fuel or energy the miles require, weather and stop links for the corridor, service intervals falling due inside the trip's mileage, and the documents the load needs.
Stage four: dispatch stages that enforce order
The dispatch board moves a load from available through booked, dispatched, in transit, delivered, invoiced, paid and settled. The transitions are validated rather than decorative — a load cannot be invoiced before it is marked delivered, which is the single most common source of invoice disputes in small operations.
Stage five: getting paid
Invoices are numbered sequentially in an MFAH-year-sequence format so the numbering survives audit. Payments can be full or partial, and reversals are recorded rather than deleted so the history stays intact. Receivables age by open balance, cash flow reconciles what was billed against what actually arrived, and a load settles automatically when its invoice reaches paid in full.
Stage six: what the numbers become
Once a load is settled its actual economics join the accounting journal, and from there the monthly dashboard, the lane profitability table and the broker record. Over time the break-even figure the platform uses to judge the next load stops being a guess and starts being the operator's own measured cost per mile.