Data Decisions Lab  ·  Trucking & freight

Where every mile earns — and where it bleeds.

Custom BI dashboards for trucking fleets running 10–40 power units. Reads your TMS exports and ELD data; working prototype in 2–3 weeks. Pay once. No Tableau, no Power BI, no per-seat licences. Your data stays inside your perimeter.

BI / data analytics hello@datadecisionslab.com
2–3wk working prototype
on your real data
1× build fee,
paid once
0 per-seat
licences, ever
100% data stays
in your perimeter

Founder pricing — $3,000 flat for audit + single-panel build (3 slots open). Standard rates: audit from $1,500, custom dashboard build from $5,000. Full pricing →

Spot rates haven't moved. Fuel hasn't moved. So why is the fleet P&L worse than last year? The answer is almost always inside your own data — you just can't see it from a TMS report.
01

What a fleet dashboard actually answers

  1. True per-mile P&L, not aggregated revenue

    Revenue per mile is the easy number. The honest number — after fuel, deadhead, detention, factoring fees, quick-pay discounts, dispatch overhead, maintenance and insurance — is the one that tells you which lanes and customers actually keep the lights on.

  2. Deadhead, OOR and empty-mile leakage by lane and driver

    Deadhead percentage is the single biggest hidden killer of small-fleet margin. See it broken out by lane, customer, dispatcher and driver. Find the patterns — usually it's two or three customers and one dispatcher driving most of it.

  3. On-time leakage and detention recovery

    On-time delivery rate by customer, lane and facility. Where you're losing fuel surcharge revenue. Which shippers chronically detain your trucks beyond the free hours, and how much of that detention you're actually billing and collecting.

  4. Driver and truck scorecards

    Revenue per driver per week, MPG, idle time, hard-braking events, on-time rate, customer feedback, safety score. Volume on its own doesn't tell the story — line it up next to margin and the ranking shifts.

  5. Customer and lane profitability

    Revenue per customer is easy. Profit per customer — after FSC reconciliation, quick-pay, deadhead caused by their pickup patterns, detention, and rate-vs-spot comparison — is honest. Some big customers cost more than they bring.

  6. Cash flow and factoring economics

    Days-to-pay by customer. Factoring fees as % of gross. Quick-pay leakage. Receivables aging. Where your working capital is actually trapped, and which customers are quietly funding their operations off your float.

02

Why TMS-built reports aren't enough

TMS-built reports

  • Aggregated to lane or customer — true unit cost is missing.
  • No fuel-card integration, no factoring fees, no dispatch overhead.
  • Fixed templates. If your TMS doesn’t support the metric, you can’t have it.
  • ELD, accounting and TMS live in separate systems with separate logins.
  • Comparing against last year requires manually exporting and reconciling.

Custom-built fleet dashboard

  • True per-mile P&L after every cost the TMS doesn’t know about.
  • TMS + ELD + fuel card + accounting + spot-rate data, in one view.
  • Any metric your operation actually cares about — including the weird ones.
  • Year-over-year, lane-vs-lane, driver-vs-driver, all in the same panel.
  • Opens in any browser. Hosted on your network or your domain — your call.

TMS reporting works when the question is “what happened”. A custom dashboard works when the question is “why, and where is the leak”.

03

Works with your stack

TMS & dispatch

  • McLeod LoadMaster
  • Aljex
  • TruckMate
  • Tai TMS, AscendTMS
  • Excel / CSV exports from anything else

ELD & fleet

  • Samsara
  • Motive (KeepTruckin)
  • Geotab, Omnitracs
  • Verizon Connect

Fuel & payments

  • WEX, EFS, Comdata fuel cards
  • Factoring statements (TBS, Apex, RTS, etc.)
  • QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite

Market & spot data

  • DAT load board exports
  • FreightWaves SONAR (where licensed)
  • Truckstop.com

Don’t see your TMS or ELD here? Almost everything in trucking exports to CSV in some form. If yours does, the dashboard can be built on top of it.

04

What changes once the panel is live

Margin

The two unprofitable customers surface

Almost every small fleet has them. Looks like good revenue on the top line, looks like a disaster after deadhead, detention and quick-pay. Hard to argue with once the number is on the screen next to every other customer.

Dispatch

Empty miles drop 3–8%

Once dispatchers can see deadhead per load attributed to them, behaviour changes fast. The dashboard doesn’t fix the routes — it makes the cost visible enough that the people driving it start fixing it themselves.

Drivers

The real performance picture

Highest-revenue driver isn’t always the most profitable. Line up revenue against MPG, idle time, on-time rate and maintenance cost — the ranking usually shifts. The quiet ones often carry the fleet.

Detention

Billable detention you weren’t billing

Most carriers under-bill detention by 20–40%. ELD data shows arrival and departure timestamps. Cross-reference with the rate confirmation, and the unbilled hours surface automatically.

Cash

Working capital gets less random

Days-to-pay by customer is rarely tracked. Once it is, conversations with the slow-paying customers start happening. Some get put on quick-pay, some get renegotiated, some get dropped. All of it improves cash position.

Decisions

Same numbers, less arguing

Half of every ops meeting used to be agreeing on the numbers. With the panel open in front of dispatch, the operations manager and the owner, the conversation jumps straight to what to do about them.

05

How we work together

  1. 1

    Intro call, 30 minutes

    You walk me through the fleet, what your dispatchers and owner argue about, what numbers you don’t trust today. I ask about your TMS, ELD, fuel cards and accounting. Free, no commitment.

  2. 2

    Data audit, 3–5 days · from $1,500

    I look at exports from your TMS, ELD and accounting. I map sources, gaps and reconciliation issues, and come back with a written report plus a firm fixed quote for the build. If you don’t want to go ahead, no further commitment.

  3. 3

    Working prototype, 2–3 weeks · from $5,000

    I build a minimal working version on your real fleet data — usually per-mile P&L, dispatch view and driver scorecard. We review it together and decide what to add, change or drop.

  4. 4

    Final version, handover and optional retainer

    I polish, document and walk dispatch and ops through the panel. From there it’s either an optional retainer for ongoing changes (quoted on call) or you carry on with it on your own. The data and logic are yours either way.

06

Live demo · 85,000 long-haul loads

The numbers in the demo are synthetic but the structure, metric definitions and formulae mirror what a real small-fleet build looks like. Your version would use your own data, your own customers, your own drivers.

07

Frequently asked

We use McLeod / Aljex / TruckMate. Does that work?
Yes. I work with exports from McLeod, Aljex, TruckMate and most other trucking TMS platforms. Where the TMS allows API access, the dashboard gets wired in directly. Where it doesn’t, scheduled CSV exports work just as well.
Our data is messy and incomplete. Is that a problem?
That’s the typical starting point, not a blocker. The data audit explicitly maps gaps, duplicates and reconciliation issues, and tells you what can be measured today versus what needs preparation. Most freight data starts messy and ends usable.
Why not just use the reports built into our TMS?
TMS reports are aggregated, generic and rarely show true per-mile economics after fuel, deadhead, detention, factoring fees and dispatch costs. A custom dashboard combines TMS, ELD, fuel-card and accounting data into one P&L view — which no TMS does on its own.
What about ELD and HOS data?
ELD data from Samsara, Motive (KeepTruckin), Geotab and similar providers integrates cleanly. HOS compliance, idle time, hard-braking and route efficiency all sit in the same dashboard as the financial data, not in separate logins.
We only run 12 trucks. Are we too small?
Fleets of 10–15 power units are typical. The economics of a custom build make sense from around 10 trucks upwards — below that, well-built spreadsheets often do the job.
How long does it take?
Data audit: 3–5 days. Working prototype on your real fleet data: 2–3 weeks. Final polished version with documentation and team handover: 4–6 weeks total.
Where will the dashboard live?
Wherever suits you: your domain, an internal server, a private link, or just locally on the operations manager’s laptop. Your data doesn’t leave your perimeter unless you want it to.
Do you sign NDAs?
Yes, before any data changes hands.

Curious where the leak is in your fleet?

Drop a couple of lines about your fleet — number of trucks, what TMS and ELD you run, what you wish you could see but can’t. I reply within a day and tell you whether it’s worth a 30-minute call.

or email me directly — hello@datadecisionslab.com