Total revenue is the number that hides the problem. A dispatch service billing steadily each month feels healthy right up until you break the book down truck by truck and discover that two units generate most of the margin, one is roughly break-even, and one costs you more in hours than it pays. Nobody plans it that way. It happens because dispatch fees scale with a carrier’s gross while your workload scales with a carrier’s chaos, and those two things are unrelated. Here is the review that surfaces it, using numbers you already have.
The Four Numbers You Need Per Truck
Pull one month — last month, not a good month — and build a row for every truck you dispatch. Four columns, nothing more:
- Fee revenue. What you actually collected, not what you invoiced. If a carrier is 30 days behind, that difference belongs in this review, not in a separate conversation about collections.
- Loads booked. The raw count. This is your denominator for almost everything that follows.
- Your hours on that truck. Booking calls, check calls, problem-solving, paperwork chasing, the Sunday night text thread. Estimate honestly in half-hour blocks; precision matters less than being consistent across trucks.
- Exception events. Count them: late deliveries, breakdowns, detention disputes, missing paperwork, loads that fell apart. This is the column that explains the hours column.
Now compute two ratios per truck: fee revenue divided by your hours, and fee revenue divided by loads booked. The first is your effective hourly rate on that account. The second tells you whether you are being paid for volume or for difficulty.
Reading the Spread
The spread between your best and worst truck is usually wider than dispatchers expect — frequently three or four to one on effective hourly rate. What matters is the reason, because different causes have different fixes.
A truck that is low on fee revenue and low on hours is not a problem. It is a small account behaving like a small account. A truck that is low on fee revenue and high on hours is the one to act on. Look at its exception column: if the hours are driven by equipment failures or a driver who does not communicate, that is a carrier-side issue you can raise directly. If they are driven by the lanes you are booking — long deadhead, difficult receivers, appointment-heavy freight — that is yours to fix.
There is also a market-condition version of this. When linehaul softens and fuel spikes, a percentage-based fee falls even though your workload rises — you are making more calls to cover the same truck at a lower rate. That is exactly the environment right now: dry van linehaul recently averaged $2.21 per mile per FleetOwner’s summary of DAT and FTR data, while the national diesel average climbed to $5.652 per gallon in the week of August 24 per EIA.
U.S. diesel tops $100 per barrel for the first time as conflict drives fuel costs higher.
FleetOwner, Diesel prices surge as U.S. diesel market tops $100 per barrel for first time
Five Fixes, Ranked From Easiest to Hardest
- Fix the collection lag first. The cheapest margin improvement available to a dispatch service is getting paid on time for work already done. Move to weekly billing tied to delivery rather than monthly, and put the payment term in the service agreement rather than leaving it to habit.
- Set a floor under the percentage. A straight percentage of gross means a soft market cuts your pay for harder work. A percentage with a per-load minimum protects the downside without changing the structure your carrier already understands.
- Charge for the exception work. Detention disputes, reconsignments, and load recoveries are real labor. Many dispatch services do them free and then wonder where the hours went. Naming a fee also, usefully, reduces how often the situation arises.
- Change what you book before you change what you charge. If one truck’s hours come from appointment-heavy freight with difficult receivers, the fix may be lane selection, not pricing. Test it for a month before you have a rate conversation.
- Reprice or release the account. If a truck is still at the bottom of the spread after the first four fixes, you have a pricing problem. Bring the review to the carrier with the numbers — loads, hours, exceptions — and propose a rate that reflects the work. Some will agree. The ones who will not are telling you what to do next.
The Conversation, Not the Spreadsheet, Is the Hard Part
Dispatchers avoid this review because the conclusion often points at a carrier they like. Worth separating two things: whether an account is pleasant and whether it is profitable. Both matter, but only one pays your bills, and a relationship that quietly costs you money eventually degrades on its own when you start rationing attention without admitting it.
The version of this conversation that works is factual and unemotional. Show the loads, the hours, and the exception count. Do not argue about effort. Propose a specific change — a floor, an exception fee, a different lane mix — and let the carrier decide. Carriers who understand their own cost per mile, the kind of operator groups like OOIDA and cost research from ATRI have pushed for years, will follow the logic immediately because they run the same math on their own trucks.
What to Do Next
Block ninety minutes this week and build the four-column table for last month. You do not need software for this — a spreadsheet with one row per truck is enough, and the exercise is more valuable when you have to reconstruct the hours by hand because it forces you to remember where the time actually went.
Then pick exactly one fix from the list and run it for thirty days before adding another. Most dispatch services that do this find the same thing: the account that felt hardest was also the least profitable, and it had been that way for months. You cannot price what you have never measured.
