The yard is the part of the site most warehouse systems ignore: the space between the gate and the door where vehicles wait, get parked, and get moved around. For a busy 3PL that yard is where a lot of time and goodwill is won or lost. Loaditude treats it as a managed area in its own right, so you always know which vehicles are on site, where they are parked, and which spaces are free. This guide covers setting a yard up and running day-to-day operations on it.
Defining a yard
A yard in Loaditude is a physical site you operate. You can run more than one, and each is set up and managed separately. Yards are reachable from the sidebar and from the yard dashboard, and the yards list is paginated so larger operations stay tidy. Each yard has a Settings tab where you set its timezone and its weekly operating hours, the window in which the yard is meant to be working. Those operating hours are not just a label: they feed straight into the dock schedule, which shades the non-operating part of the day so a slot outside hours is obvious at a glance.
Zones and parking spots
Inside a yard you describe the actual layout with two building blocks:
- Zones are areas of the yard, for example a goods-in waiting area, a loading lane, or an HGV park.
- Parking spots are the individual positions a vehicle can occupy. When you add a spot, Loaditude suggests the zones you have already created, so spots stay grouped under the right area without re-keying. Code fields reject invalid characters as you type, so spot and zone codes stay clean.
Together, zones and spots give you a model of the yard that matches the tarmac, which is what makes the live occupancy view meaningful. If you ever need to remove a site, you can delete a yard outright.
The yard map and real-time occupancy
The point of describing the yard is to see it filled in. The yard map reflects real occupancy: when a vehicle is checked in to a spot, that spot is marked occupied, and when it leaves or moves on, the spot frees up again. Yard cards also show who the goods are for, so a glance at the yard tells your team not just that a space is taken, but which client and customer the vehicle in it is delivering for. That context is the difference between “a lorry is in bay 4” and “the inbound for Acme is in bay 4”.
Checking a vehicle in
When a vehicle arrives, you check it in. A check-in lets you assign a parking spot, and a driver and vehicle, so the record captures who is on site and where. The moment you assign a spot, that spot is marked occupied and the yard map updates to reflect real occupancy. Check-ins created from a transport job carry the client and customer through, so a job-linked arrival shows the client name in the yard schedule with a link back to the job for quick reference.
Check-ins are commonly the second half of a booked arrival: a carrier books a dock slot ahead of time, then on the day you check the vehicle in to a spot against that booking. See Dock scheduling and expected goods for the booking side of that flow.
Yard moves
Vehicles rarely sit in one place from arrival to departure. A truck might wait in a holding zone, then move to a loading lane when a door comes free. A yard move repositions a vehicle between spots and can be assigned to a driver, so the person doing the shunt is recorded and the map stays accurate as the vehicle moves. Because the map tracks every move, the occupancy you see is the occupancy that exists, not a snapshot someone forgot to update.
Clear forms, fewer mistakes
Yard work happens at the gate, often in a hurry, so the forms are built to fail loudly rather than silently. Check-in, move, and booking forms show the specific validation message when something is wrong instead of closing without explanation, code fields reject invalid characters as you type, and the dropdowns match the rest of the app. The result is that a gatehouse or yard marshal can work quickly without leaving half-finished records behind.
How the yard fits the wider operation
- Operating hours and timezone are per yard, so a site with different shift patterns is modelled correctly rather than forced to share one company-wide window.
- Occupancy is live, because it is driven by check-ins and moves rather than a manually maintained board.
- Arrivals carry context, so every vehicle on the map is tied to the client and customer it is there for.
- It connects to receiving, so a checked-in inbound flows naturally into the goods-in process at the door.
Where to go next
- Dock scheduling and expected goods covers booking dock slots and listing what is expected on each one.
- Goods-in and receiving covers what happens once a vehicle is at the door and unloading.