Good transport planning starts with good records. Before the Job Planner can warn you that a vehicle is full or a driver’s licence has lapsed, it needs to know your vehicles and your drivers. Fleet and driver management in Loaditude is where you hold that information: the capacities and operating hours of each vehicle, and the qualifications, hours and status of each driver. Keep these up to date and the rest of the system does the right thing automatically.
Adding vehicles
Each vehicle has its own record under Fleet. You capture the basics, the registration, type, make, model and year, and the type covers the range a typical operator runs: van, rigid, articulated, trailer, or other. The record is the single place a vehicle’s details live, so everyone plans against the same truth.
Capacity and operating hours
Two parts of the vehicle record drive the planner directly, so they are worth getting right:
- Capacity: set the vehicle’s weight allowance in kilograms, its volume, and its pallet positions. These feed the capacity meter on the planner and let the system stop you overloading a vehicle when you place work onto it.
- Operating hours: set the open and close time for each day of the week, and mark days the vehicle is not in service. The planner uses these so it does not schedule work outside the hours a vehicle actually runs.
You can also set an out-of-service window with a from and to date, so a vehicle booked in for work is taken out of planning for exactly that period rather than being assigned by mistake.
Vehicle compliance and defects
A vehicle record is also a compliance record. Loaditude tracks the dates that keep a vehicle legal and roadworthy: MOT expiry, tax expiry, insurance expiry, operator’s licence expiry, tachograph calibration, and the next service due. Keeping these on the vehicle means a renewal is never a surprise. Each vehicle also carries a defects log, so a reported fault, its severity and whether it has been resolved are recorded against the vehicle rather than lost on a paper sheet. A vehicle can sit in a clear status, available, in use, maintenance, off road, or retired, so its state is always visible.
Driver accounts are their own thing
Drivers are not office users. A driver has their own record and signs in to the dedicated Loaditude Driver app with their own credentials, kept separate from the people who log in to the web platform. That separation matters for two reasons. Drivers only ever see the runs assigned to them, which keeps their app simple and your wider data private. And you can add, suspend or retire a driver without touching your office user seats. Each driver carries an employment type and a status, available, on duty, off duty, suspended, or inactive, so dispatch always knows who is actually on the road today.
Licence, medical, CPC and ADR expiry
The compliance heart of the driver record is a set of expiry dates: driving licence, medical, Driver CPC, and ADR for hazardous loads. These are the dates that decide whether a driver is legal for a given job, so Loaditude does two things with them. It shows them on the driver record with clear date labels so an upcoming expiry is easy to spot, and it reads them live in the Job Planner: when you allocate a job to a driver, the planner warns you if their licence, CPC or medical has expired, or if a hazardous job needs ADR the driver does not hold. The warning lets you stay in control, but you are never unknowingly sending out a non-compliant driver. The single best habit for a transport operator is to keep these four dates current for every driver.
Crew size and two-person jobs
Some work cannot be done alone. A driver record supports crewing, so a job can be staffed with a lead driver plus one or more operatives. A job carries a required crew size, taken from the job or from a job-type default, and the planner compares the crew you have assigned against what the job needs. A job that is short shows its assigned-against-required count, for example “1/2”, turns amber, and is totalled in an under-crewed counter for the day. When you plan by driver, a two-person job appears on each crew member’s lane, so everyone scheduled to be on it can see it. The result is that assisted jobs go out properly staffed instead of a second pair of hands being remembered at the last minute.
Timesheets and duty hours
Drivers record their time through the app, and that time is broken down the way a transport operator needs it: driving, other work, breaks, rest, and periods of availability. Alongside the timesheet, each driver has contracted daily hours. The planner shows the planned duty hours you are building for a driver against those contracted hours and turns the lane red when the day runs over, so you can rebalance before a driver is pushed past a sensible day. Together the timesheet and the planned-hours view give you both the record of what was worked and a forward look at what you are about to ask of someone.
How it all fits together
- Vehicles give the planner capacity and operating hours, so it can warn on overloading and out-of-hours work.
- Drivers give the planner qualifications and contracted hours, so it can warn on expired licences, missing ADR, and over-long days.
- Crew requirements let the planner flag under-crewed jobs before they leave the yard.
Where to go next
- The Job Planner covers building the day’s plan from these vehicles and drivers.
- Transport jobs and proof of delivery covers dispatching to a driver and capturing proof on the road.