A TMS reduces a carrier's costs in five places: deadhead miles it shows before a truck is committed, detention it bills with timestamps, invoices that go out the day the POD lands, settlements built from the same trip record, and fuel and jurisdiction miles pulled from integrations instead of receipts. ATRI put the average cost of running a truck at $2.336 per mile in 2025, so every one of these is worth real money on every trip. Here is each, with what TransPlus customers measured.
This post is written for the carrier, not the shipper: the numbers are a truck's numbers, and the software is trucking dispatch software that builds the load once so dispatch, driver pay and the invoice come off that record.
1. Deadhead you can see before you commit a truck
ATRI put empty miles at 16.7 percent of all miles in 2024. On a truck that runs 100,000 miles a year, that is about 16,700 miles fuelled, insured and driven with nothing on the trailer. A dispatch board that shows where every truck will be empty tomorrow, not just where it sits now, lets a dispatcher price the deadhead into the quote or find the load that removes it. The cost does not disappear; it becomes visible early enough to do something about, which is the difference between a 16 percent problem and a line on the rate confirmation.
2. Detention you actually bill
ATRI found drivers were detained on 39.3 percent of stops in 2023, and that detention invoices were paid less than half the time. The unpaid half is usually an argument about arrival and departure times that the carrier cannot prove. When the driver's arrival and departure come off the app or the telematics feed onto the trip record, the detention line on the invoice carries timestamps instead of memory, and the broker who remembers it differently is arguing with the clock.
Trucking dispatch software built on one trip record
Build the load once. Dispatch, driver pay and the invoice come off that record. Plans from $350 per month for one user, billed quarterly.
3. Invoices out the day the POD lands
The fastest cost reduction in the list is not a cost at all; it is cash. An invoice that waits for a paper POD to reach the office waits days, and the receivable ages with it. When the driver's POD lands on the load from the app and the invoice builds from the rate already on that load, billing runs the same day. SM Freight cut its invoicing cycle from two weeks to 48 hours on TransPlus (Wendy Stafford, Owner). Read the SM Freight story.
4. Settlements built from the trip, not a second spreadsheet
Driver pay keyed from trip sheets into a spreadsheet is the same load typed a third time, with a third chance to get it wrong. Wrong pay is an argument with a driver; late pay is a driver looking at the job board. When settlements build from the trip record dispatch already entered, the miles, the accessorials and the pay rules apply once, and the office hours go somewhere else. Montana Group of Companies cut daily invoicing from 3 hours to 30 minutes on TransPlus (Sue Sharma, Sales Manager), and CMW Express reported productivity up 30 percent across dispatch, billing and payroll. Read the Montana story.
5. Fuel and IFTA from the integrations, not the shoebox
Fuel card integrations land every transaction against the truck and driver that bought it, mileage integrations supply jurisdiction miles, and the telematics feed supplies the miles actually run. Cost per mile becomes a per-truck, per-week number instead of a quarterly guess, and the IFTA quarter becomes a report instead of a weekend. On TransPlus, IFTA reporting (Enterprise plan) produces the quarterly report of jurisdiction miles and fuel; you or your filing service submit the return.
None of the five is a percentage promised by a vendor. Each is a cost the trip record makes visible and a job it stops someone doing twice. See trucking dispatch software, check plans from $350 per month for one user, or book a personalized demo, scheduled the same week you ask, with no commitment.
Related: What Is the ROI with Transportation Management Software?
Related reading: top 5 ways a TMS reduces cost-per-mile in trucking, 10 ways to improve semi truck fuel economy, and what is the ROI with transportation management software.
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