Dispatching tips for a fleet with no full-time dispatcher come down to doing four things in order, every day, with arithmetic instead of memory: size the run from the stops before the truck leaves, keep one board the drivers move from the road, roster the week with the spare days counted, and record the exception at the stop it happened rather than on Friday. None of the four needs software to start, all of them need a sheet, and the free sheets on this site are those sheets. This page is the four, the reason each one matters, and the figure each one gives.
Size the run before the truck leaves
Seven stops at twenty minutes each with twenty-five minutes between them is 315 minutes, and a driver may drive at most 11 hours inside a 14-hour window with a 30-minute break after 8 hours of driving (FMCSA). The dispatch schedule does that arithmetic from the stops and the times and shows the headroom; a run that reads negative is moved before it is assigned, not apologised for at four o'clock. Put the windowed stops early and count them per truck.
Keep one board, and let the drivers move it
A whiteboard the office updates is a record of what the office was told. A board the drivers move from the road at each stop is a record of what happened, with the time. Runsheetly Pro is that board; before it, a shared sheet the drivers can edit from the phone does the same job badly and still beats the whiteboard.
Roster the week with the spare days counted
Six drivers with two days off each are thirty driver-days; four trucks on five days are twenty assignments; two spare days held for the sick call and the breakdown leave eight of slack. The dispatch scheduling sheet works it. A roster with no spare days is a roster that is rebuilt on the phone at five in the morning.
Record the exception where it happened, then change one thing
An exception at stop four at 12:20 is a figure; an exception remembered on Friday is an argument. Read the week's exceptions, the minutes per run against the schedule and the windows missed, and change one thing: a stop off the Tuesday run, a window renegotiated, a sixth driver's days off. Dispatching well is not heroics at four o'clock; it is one change a week from the record.
Questions people ask about dispatching tips
What is the most important dispatching tip?
Size the run from the stops and the stop and drive times before the truck leaves, and check it against the driving limit. The free dispatch schedule does it in a minute.
How do I dispatch when I also drive?
Size the other runs with the sheet before leaving, keep the board on every driver's phone so it moves without you, and roster the week with spare days so a sick call is a name moved rather than a day rebuilt.
How many spare driver-days should a small fleet hold?
Enough that the coverage per ten truck-shifts reads above about fourteen on the roster sheet; below that every absence parks a truck.