Run sheets
for small fleets.

What a run sheet is for

A run sheet is the day, written down. It tells a driver where to go, in what order, what to pick up and drop at each stop, and what the customer expects. For a one-vehicle business it is the whole operation on a page. For a six-vehicle business it is six pages that have to agree with each other and with the office.

The job of a run sheet is not to record what happened. It is to make the day go the way it was planned, and to absorb the changes that arrive after the plan was made. A run sheet that cannot change after seven in the morning is a diary, not a tool.

What goes on it

Every stop needs the customer, the address, what is being picked up or delivered, how many and of what, any reference the customer uses, and a note for the things that do not fit a column: the gate code, the forklift that finishes at three, the receiver who only signs on the second floor.

The stops need to be in the order they will be driven, not the order they were booked. That sounds obvious and it is the single most common failure in a paper run sheet, because the office writes jobs down as they come in and the driver is left to re-sort them in the cab.

Driving order, and who decides it

Most small operators let the driver sort the run, and that is usually right: the driver knows the roads, the traffic and which customers can wait. The office’s job is to hand over a run that is already grouped sensibly, by suburb or by direction, so the driver is fine-tuning rather than starting from a list.

Pickups and deliveries should be grouped by where the driver is going, not by whether they are a pickup or a delivery. A pickup in Wodonga belongs with the Wodonga deliveries, even if it was booked an hour after them.

The job that arrives at ten past nine

The run sheet is tested by the jobs that arrive after the day has started. A customer rings the office, or walks up to the driver at a dock, and wants something taken today. On paper that becomes a phone call, a scribble in the margin, and later a job that was never priced because nobody wrote it on the sheet that goes to invoicing.

The fix is to let the job be added where it arrives, by whoever it arrives to, and to have it land on the right run with a price already on it. If the driver can add a job from the vehicle in a few taps, with the customer looked up rather than typed, the office finds out without a call and the invoice is right without a reconciliation.

Proof, not memory

A run sheet that only says a job was delivered is a claim. A run sheet that holds the photo, the signature, the time and the place is evidence. The difference shows up the day a customer says the freight never arrived. Keep the proof with the job, not in a driver’s photo roll, and keep it for as long as a customer might ask.

Why paper costs more than it looks

A paper run sheet is free to print and expensive to use. It has to be written by the office, read by the driver, written on again through the day, brought back, read again by whoever does the invoicing, and typed into whatever creates the invoice. Every one of those steps is a chance to miss a job, and a missed job is revenue that never arrives.

A run sheet on the driver’s phone removes most of those steps. The job is written once, by whoever first hears about it, and the same record drives the day, holds the proof and becomes the line on the invoice. That is how Nado does it: the run is on the driver’s phone in driving order, jobs can be added from the vehicle or the office, proof of delivery is captured at the door, and every job is priced as it is logged so there is nothing to type up at the end of the day.