Dispatcher workflows

As Dispatcher, you own the operational core of Logistall — shipments, routes, fleet, drivers, and scheduling. Quotes and customers are visible to you read-only, and finance pages aren’t part of your role. Your day has two halves: reacting to what’s moving right now, and preparing what moves next.

Your morning

1. Open the Dashboard. The KPI cards give you the state of the operation at a glance — Active Shipments, Exceptions, Available Drivers, and Available Vehicles. Select a card to open the underlying list on the right (Dashboard).
2. Deal with Exceptions first — these are shipments flagged with an exception status that need your attention before anything new gets booked.
3. Glance at the Fleet Map to see where every vehicle actually is: green dots are available, blue are on route, amber are in maintenance. Positions refresh every 30 seconds on their own (Fleet).
4. Check Dock Appointments for today’s inbound and outbound slots, and use the row’s quick-action button to Confirm anything still sitting at scheduled (Scheduling).

Tip

Need a specific record fast at any point in the day? Press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac) to open global search — it looks across shipments, customers, invoices, and drivers at once (Getting Started).

When a booking comes in: accepted quote to delivered shipment

1. Start from an accepted quote — you can view quotes, but owners and data admins create them, and there’s no one-click convert (Quotes & Rate Cards).
2. Create the shipment on Shipments with the quote’s customer, route, mode and pricing; keep the quote number in the customer reference (Shipments).
3. Assign the carrier, or run the load with your own fleet — the vehicle and driver are assigned on the route (Routes & Load Plans), drawn from your vehicle roster (Fleet).
4. Plan the route and its stops; build a load plan and use Optimize to pack it against the vehicle’s payload capacity (Routes & Load Plans).
5. Book a dock appointment where needed; appointments move scheduled → confirmed → arrived → completed (Scheduling).
6. Move the shipment along its statuses (draft → booked → pickup scheduled → in transit → … → delivered) — every change notifies the team (Shipments).
7. Share the public tracking link with the customer — it shows status, cities, and dates only, never names or prices (Shipments).
8. Download the CMR PDF for the driver and customs (Shipments).

Caution

Load-plan utilization is your overload warning: green at 80% or below, amber above 80%, red above 95%. The display caps at 100% even if the assigned weight exceeds the vehicle’s payload — so a plan sitting exactly at 100% is your signal to open it and take shipments off yourself; Optimize only reorders and recalculates, it never removes anything (Routes & Load Plans).

Scenario: an accepted quote lands for an FTL load, Casablanca to Tangier. You create the shipment with the quote’s customer, route, and pricing, putting the quote number in the customer reference. Your own fleet has capacity, so you assign a truck and driver on the route, add the load to a load plan, and hit Optimize — utilization comes back green. You book an outbound dock slot for the pickup morning, move the shipment to booked, and Share the tracking link with the customer. From here the driver takes over the timeline from My Loads, and you watch the dot move on the Fleet Map.

While loads are moving

1. Follow progress on the Dashboard and the live Fleet Map (30-second refresh); the driver logs timeline events from their own My Loads page (Dashboard, Driver).
2. Advance dock appointments as trucks turn up — Arrived once the vehicle is at the dock, Complete when it’s done — straight from the row’s quick-action buttons (Scheduling).
3. When something goes wrong on the road, the shipment’s status can be set to exception — it then shows up in the Dashboard’s Exceptions card where you (and everyone else) can see it needs handling (Shipments).

Note

You and the driver write to the same tracking timeline. Their events from My Loads appear instantly on the Shipments page and on any tracking link you’ve shared — you don’t need to relay anything to the customer by phone.

Keep the fleet healthy

A weekly pass over the fleet pages keeps surprises off the road:

1. Log service work on Vehicle Maintenance — a next-due date within 14 days is highlighted in amber so nothing slips. Logistall also emails your company owner a daily digest of everything due in the next 14 days (Fleet).
2. Record fill-ups on Fuel Logs; Logistall computes each entry’s per-liter cost for you automatically, so you can compare fuel efficiency across fill-ups at a glance (Fleet).
3. Track individual vehicle movements on Trips, optionally linked to a shipment, vehicle, and driver (Fleet).
4. Borrow a vehicle from a partner carrier with Borrow Truck on All Fleet, and close the borrowing out with Mark Returned once it’s back. The Ownership badge on All Fleet always tells you which trucks are yours and which are on loan (Fleet).

Tip

Short of trucks for a busy week? All Fleet only offers vehicles you don’t own in the Borrow Truck picker, defaults the lender to the vehicle’s own carrier, and lets you record the daily rate and an end date — so the paper trail for the loan is done in one form (Fleet).

Record trip expenses

You can record driver and trip expenses — tolls, fuel, parking, and similar — on the Expenses page. Every expense you enter starts at pending status regardless of what you fill in; only an owner or data admin can approve it from there (Finance).

Outside your role

Quotes and customers are visible to you but read-only — you don’t create or edit them. Invoices, payments, carrier bills, and the margin view belong to accountants (Accountant); user management belongs to company owners.

Related pages

• Workflows overview
• Shipments
• Routes & Load Plans
• Fleet