A dock that runs on phone calls and a whiteboard is a dock that runs on luck. Two carriers turn up for the same door, a load arrives with nobody expecting it, and the team loses an hour working out what is actually in the trailer. Dock scheduling in Loaditude replaces that with a planned, 24-hour view of every door, booking references you can hand to the carrier, and a list of exactly what each inbound is bringing. This is a how-to: follow the steps below to book, manage, and receive against a dock slot.
Before you start
Dock scheduling sits on top of your yards, so set those up first: each yard’s doors, timezone, and weekly operating hours come from its settings. See Yard setup and operations if you have not configured a yard yet. With that in place, the schedule knows which doors exist and which hours are working hours.
Step 1: Open the dock schedule
The dock schedule shows every door across all your yards at a glance, rather than defaulting to a single site, with the yard selector available as an optional filter when you want to narrow the view. It presents the full 24-hour day on the correct calendar day, scrolls horizontally across doors, lists every booking for that day, and shades the non-operating hours so slots outside your working window stand out. You can jump to any date to plan ahead or review what happened.
Step 2: Book a dock slot
Create a booking against a door and a time. As you book you can record who the goods are for: the Who for field searches both your clients and their customers, so you can attach a booking directly to the end customer it belongs to. There is also a Customer reference field for the carrier’s or customer’s own reference. Loaditude prevents you from booking the same door for an overlapping time, so two vehicles can never be scheduled into one door at once.
Step 3: Use the booking reference
Every dock slot gets its own booking reference automatically, for example DCK-20260626-0007. It appears on the booking and on the confirmation shown when you book the slot. Give that reference to the carrier or driver so that when the vehicle arrives, the gatehouse can match it to the right booking immediately rather than guessing from a company name. The reference is the shared handle that ties the carrier’s paperwork to your schedule.
Step 4: List the expected goods
For an inbound booking, list what you expect to receive. You add product lines and the quantities you are expecting, so the warehouse knows what is arriving before the doors open. That expected-goods list is what turns a dock slot from “a vehicle is coming” into “these SKUs in these quantities are coming”, which lets the receiving team prepare space and labour and, when the load lands, check what arrived against what was promised.
Step 5: Reschedule when plans change
Plans move, and the schedule moves with them. Drag a booking to a new time or to a different door to reschedule it. You can also click a booking to view it, change its status, or cancel it. Rescheduling is safe: dragging a booking to a new time or door, or changing its status, no longer clears its reference or notes, so the details you captured when you booked survive the move. The overlap rule still applies, so a reschedule can never double-book a door.
Step 6: Check the vehicle in on the day
When the booked vehicle arrives, check it in to a parking spot. A check-in assigns the spot, and a driver and vehicle, which marks the spot occupied and updates the yard map to reflect real occupancy. Bookings and check-ins created from a transport job show the client name in the schedule and link back to the job, so a job-linked arrival is fully traceable. From here the inbound flows into receiving at the door, where the team can reconcile the actual goods against the expected-goods list from Step 4.
What you get from scheduling the dock
- No clashes, because overlapping bookings on the same door are prevented at the point of booking and rescheduling.
- A shared reference, because every slot has an auto-generated booking reference to give the carrier.
- A prepared warehouse, because the expected-goods list tells the team what is arriving and in what quantity.
- A live picture, because checking the vehicle in ties the booking to a real spot on the yard map.
Where to go next
- Yard setup and operations covers the yards, doors, and spots the schedule is built on.
- Goods-in and receiving covers reconciling an arrival against what was expected.