The three ways it gets paid for
A person. A dedicated track and trace operator, or a team of them, working the active board: calling and texting drivers, logging positions, chasing carriers who do not answer, watching appointments, and raising what is wrong with the dispatcher who owns the load. The cost is a salary plus everything a seat costs, and it goes up in steps as the board grows, because one person can only work so many loads before the loop takes longer than the loop.
An outside service. A vendor, often offshore, working the same call list on your behalf, usually priced per load or per month and often covering the night. The cost is the invoice, and it scales smoothly with volume, which is the appeal. What you are buying is the calling; what you are not buying is judgment about your freight.
Nobody in particular. Dispatchers do it between everything else, so the cost can disappear into the wider operations budget. The hours come out of booking, quoting and the customer calls that keep the account. This is the arrangement the arithmetic below is mostly for, because it is the one nobody has added up.
The arithmetic, with your numbers
We are not going to quote a salary, because a number that is right in one market is wrong in the next and we would rather you trust the method. Four inputs, all of which you know or can measure in a week:
- Active loads on a typical day (call it L)
- Checks per load per day, counting texts, calls, and chasing non-answers (C)
- Minutes per check, including the ones that go to voicemail and get retried (M)
- What an hour of the person doing it costs you, fully loaded (H)
Daily cost of the function is L × C × M ÷ 60 × H. Multiply by the working days you cover. A worked example with deliberately round inputs: 60 active loads, 3 checks each, 6 minutes a check, is 18 hours a day. That is more than two full-time people, before nights and weekends, and it is spent almost entirely confirming that nothing has happened.
Now the second calculation, which is the one that matters. Of those checks, how many found something that changed a decision? A stop that had gone on too long, a truck off route, a delivery window that would not hold. On most boards it is a small fraction, a handful of loads a day. Everything else is the cost of finding those loads by hand. The question every option below is answering is how cheaply you can find the same handful.
| Input | Round example | Where to get yours |
|---|---|---|
| Active loads per day | 60 | Your board, averaged over a month |
| Checks per load per day | 3 | Count one dispatcher's day |
| Minutes per check | 6 | Time ten, including voicemails and retries |
| Hours per day on the function | 18 | L × C × M ÷ 60 |
| Loads a day where a check changed a decision | a handful | Ask the dispatchers at the end of a week |
The costs that are not on the payroll line
Nights and weekends. Freight moves at 2 a.m. and a person does not. The choice is a night shift, a service, or an unwatched board for a third of the week, and the loads that go wrong overnight are found in the morning by the receiver.
Turnover. Track and trace is the job people leave. It is repetitive, it is the first seat cut when volume dips, and the person who is good at it gets promoted to dispatch. Every departure is a month of a new person learning which carriers answer and which do not.
The load that was missed. One missed pickup rebooked at a same-day spot rate, one delivery that arrived after the receiver closed, one detention claim denied for lack of times. Each costs more than a week of the function, and each is exactly the kind of thing a fixed cadence misses. This is the cost that makes the arithmetic above an underestimate.
The dispatcher's attention. When the function is nobody in particular, the hours do not vanish; they come out of the work that grows the brokerage. A dispatcher spending three hours a day confirming nothing happened is a dispatcher not quoting, not booking, and not on the phone with the customer who was about to move their freight elsewhere.
What outsourcing removes and leaves
A service removes the calling and, if you pay for it, the night. It scales with volume without a hiring decision. What it leaves is everything that needs to know your freight: whether this receiver ever holds a window, whether this carrier's “on time” means anything, whether the customer wants a call or an email. A service reports what the driver said. It does not tell you the driver was lying, and it does not tell you the truck has been parked in the same lot for four hours, because it has no position, only an answer. The output is a log, and someone on your side still reads the log.
It also does not change the driver's experience. The same driver gets the same calls from a different number, and the same fraction of them stop answering.
What software removes and leaves
Software removes the confirming. With a position every few minutes from the driver's phone, the carrier's ELD or a share link, the check is a comparison the board runs on its own: moving, on route, arriving inside the window, not sitting at a stop past free time. The handful of loads that need a decision come to a person already found, with the context on them, and the rest of the board is not anyone's day. It covers the night, because a threshold does not sleep, and it does not leave for a dispatch job.
What it leaves is the part that was always the point. Somebody still calls the receiver to beg a later window, still rebooks the load off a truck that broke down, still decides whether this customer gets a phone call. Software also leaves the loads it cannot see, which is why the sources matter more than any other feature: a tool that only tracks its own app has automated the easy third of the board. The real-time load visibility guide goes through what coverage on every load actually takes.
On price: LoadSignal is in early access and does not publish one yet, so we will not pretend to put a number in the comparison. What we can say is what it replaces, which is the L × C × M line above, and what it does not replace, which is the person who knows the freight.
A decision rule
Add up the hours with your own numbers. If the function is under a couple of hours a day and one dispatcher can hold it, leave it alone until it is not; the risk is small and the loads are few. If it is a person's job or more, the question is whether the person is finding the handful of loads that matter or confirming the rest, and the honest answer at most brokerages is the second. That is the function to automate first, and the person, if you keep one, becomes the one who acts on what the board finds.
An outside service is the right answer when what you lack is hours at night and you have nobody to act on what they report anyway. Software is the right answer when what you lack is attention during the day, and you want the night covered by the same rules rather than by a different call centre. How to judge the software is the next guide, and the track and trace page describes the job itself.