Load boards are an essential tool in the daily toolkit of owner-operators. Load boards began as loads posted at key truck stops in the late 1970s. In the last few decades, load boards went digital and mobile first. Now, load boards need to evolve again to be more.

With numerous load boards available today, it’s crucial for these platforms to offer more than just access to loads. To stand out, load board apps should provide differentiating features and support to address more problems that owner-operators face than just finding loads.

Existing Load board Limitations

Load boards have become the go-to solution to finding spot freight. They serve a basic need—connecting carriers with available loads. However, that means the current load boards only solve one problem: finding loads. This comes with a number of poor user experience:

1. Lack of Load Booking Integration: After a load is found, truckers still manually reach out to brokers for bidding, negotiating, and setups. Without a more integrated workflow, managing bookings becomes a highly cumbersome, manual process.
2. No Route Planning Capabilities: The absence of robust route planning tools means that truckers are piecing loads together, sometimes as not much more than scribbles on a napkin or a mental note soon to be forgotten. This limitation prevents users from optimizing delivery routes, increasing the odds of deadheading and taking loads to a dead zone.
3. Difficulty Tracking Load Documents: Once a load is booked, managing documents is a key criteria that helps ensure carriers get paid. This is a highly fragmented experience, and sometimes it's physical paper scattered everyone inside the cab.
4. Poor Ability to Evaluate Loads: Evaluating loads for cost per mile and profitability is the difference between having take home pay versus driving in the read. Most load boards will provide rudimentary cost per mile for a posted load, but not much more.
5. Search and Filter Capabilities: Effective search and filtering ensures the best load can be found, but these capabilities are difficult to do well, from an engineering perspective. Most load boards don't do this well.

These limitations can be expensive, if the load boards are paid, and creates both inefficiencies in day to day operations as well as more overhead for owner-operators.

The Best Load boards Do More

Load boards have to do more than just offer loads, and the best load boards on the market today do. Load boards are now mobile-first apps that can easily do more than just offer loads. Providing features that combine the best of load finding with the features of a TMS and then some can enhance the user experience. Here are some features we're excited about:

1 - Profitability Tracker

Most load boards provide the basic metric of cost per mile. However, this is a misguided metric and a poor proxy for profitability. What if a load board didn't just provide cost per mile but also profit per mile? Then when planning routes, owner-operators have a more holistic view of their business and can be more discerning about which loads to book.

2 - Route Planning

Basic route-planning such as backhaul recommendations or advanced filtering capabilities can supercharge how owner-operators plan their loads. This helps owner operators to reduce deadheading or to plan a series of loads towards a hot zone.

3 - Invoicing and Load Document Management

From invoicing to expense tracking, a TMS-like app simplifies an operator's financial management. Having built-in invoicing and load document allows the owner-operator to see all loads past, present, and upcoming all in one-place.

4 - Load Booking & Matching

An advanced load board should facilitate seamless booking and matching capabilities, allowing carriers to quickly and accurately confirm loads with minimal back-and-forth communication with brokers. Ideally, there are options for instant booking and bidding built-in. This capability not only saves time but also reduces the back and forth phone and email tag that is a common feature of load booking.

Skip the Real-time Load Tracking

One thing we don't mention is a feature that people often think about when it comes to load boards: real-time load tracking. Some broker offered load boards will have real time tracking. While this is a valuable and necessary feature particularly for brokers, the reality is that this feature tends to drain battery life and feels like an invasion of privacy. This particularly true because many carriers already have separate tracking solutions in place, whether through their ELD providers or other third-party services. Real-time tracking is a feature better saved for the ELD.

Getting Started on TrueNorth

Load boards are already evolving towards this new full-featured set future. TrueNorth is one such load board app. TrueNorth's App offers a robust load board and key differentiating features that sets it apart from basic load boards:

• Load board: First off, TrueNorth offers a robust free load board with fast search and filtering capabilities. Over 100,000 loads are posted daily.
• Backhaul Recommendations: For each load going out, TrueNorth matches a backhaul load coming back where one can be found
• TrueRate Profitability: Input your business' expense information and TrueNorth will calculate a profit per mile metric for each load that is available on the load board.
• Digital Dispatch: In the latest product release, the TrueNorth now also offers virtual dispatch where an AI-generated voice can take in your carrier information to send back to you personalized load recommendations. If you're not ready for a futuristic call, then Post-a-Truck is an in app alternative allowing carriers to post their availability and preferences to brokers.
• Document Capture and Load Document Management: TrueNorth offers extensive document capture and load document management features. Furthermore, once loads are uploaded to the TrueNorth App, benchmark how your earnings is doing to the market estimates.
• Invoicing and Factoring: Although not a factoring service, TrueNorth partners with BasicBlock to offer low-cost factoring services that let carriers invoice brokers or send documents to BasicBlock directly from the TrueNorth App.

Technology is changing logistics, and staying ahead requires adopting innovative solutions. A load board that can double as a lightweight TMS is the future.

Ready to get started? Download TrueNorth to get more than just a free load board.