Settlements without the Friday-night spreadsheet

By the LoadPilot team · Sep 22, 2026 · 6 min read

For many carriers, settlements are a Friday-night job: loads in one tab, advances in another, a calculator, and a driver who thinks the total is short. It takes hours, and the errors cost trust. The fix is not working faster. It is deciding the rules once and letting the numbers follow the loads.

Three common pay models

• Per load (or per move). A flat amount for each completed move. Common in drayage, where short trips and multiple moves a day make mileage awkward.
• Per mile. Pay follows distance. Common for long-haul OTR, and easy for drivers to understand.
• Percentage. A share of the load revenue. It aligns driver and company, but needs clean, final revenue numbers before pay is calculated.

Many fleets mix them: local drayage drivers by the move, long-haul drivers by the mile, owner-operators by percentage. That is fine, as long as each driver's rule is written down once and applied the same way every week.

Where settlement errors come from

1. Re-typing. Numbers copied from loads into a sheet are numbers that get mistyped.
2. Late changes. A load is edited after the pay is calculated, and nobody updates the statement.
3. Advances and deductions. Tracked on paper, forgotten on the day.
4. No breakdown. The driver sees a total, not the loads that make it up, so every question becomes an argument.

A cleaner weekly process

1. Close the period. Only completed moves with a POD go into the run.
2. Calculate from the loads. Per move, per mile or percentage, using the rule on file for each driver.
3. Add advances and deductions. From one list, not from memory.
4. Review exceptions, not everything. Look at the statements that changed or look unusual.
5. Approve and pay. Share a statement that shows every move behind the total.

How LoadPilot helps

LoadPilot builds settlements from the same completed moves you invoice. Each driver's moves appear with date, container, locations, amount and payment status, and you can generate payroll and capture payment from the same screen. Drivers can see their weekly earnings in the app. Because billing and payroll share the load, the two sets of numbers agree.

Set the rules once. Let Friday night be Friday night.