The numbers worth watching weekly are the ones the law already makes you capable of producing. They are complete, they are defensible, and they move before revenue does.
Key takeaways
Track the numbers you are already legally required to be able to produce. They are the only ones you can be confident are complete, they are the ones a regulator or an insurer will ask about, and they move before revenue does. Eight of them fit on one page, and a small fleet can generate seven of the eight from data it already holds.
We are deliberately not offering benchmark values. There is no published Canadian figure we could stand behind for what a “good” number looks like on a nine-truck fleet, and inventing one would be worse than useless. Track your own trend; the direction is the signal.
Not hours used — hours left. A driver on cycle 1 must not drive after accumulating 70 hours of on-duty time in any period of 7 days; on cycle 2 the limits are 120 hours in 14 days, and 70 hours without at least 24 consecutive hours off duty. Because ending a cycle requires at least 36 consecutive hours off for cycle 1 or 72 for cycle 2, a fleet that arrives at Friday with several drivers near the ceiling has already lost part of Monday. This is the single most predictive dispatch number there is, and most boards do not show it.
This is not optional record-keeping. A motor carrier must monitor the compliance of each driver, and on determining non-compliance must take immediate remedial action and record the dates on which the non-compliance occurred and the action taken. In British Columbia the carrier must additionally issue a notice of non-compliance to the driver, record the dates of the non-compliance and of the notice, record the action taken, obtain the driver’s signed and dated acknowledgment, and retain both for 6 months. Count events, count closures, and watch the gap. A widening gap is the earliest visible sign that dispatch is running ahead of what the fleet can lawfully do.
These convert directly into lost capacity, and the durations are fixed: an out-of-service declaration applies for 10 consecutive hours where a driver contravenes the daily driving limit, 8 hours for the mandatory off-duty provisions, and 72 hours where more than one record of duty status was kept for a day or a record was falsified. Multiply by tractor-hours and the number stops looking like a compliance statistic.
In British Columbia a carrier must not permit a driver to drive before the carrier or its agent has repaired or corrected the defects listed on the trip inspection report that may affect safe operation and certified on the report that the defect has been corrected, or certified that correction is unnecessary. Reports must be placed at the carrier’s principal place of business within 30 days of receipt, with the originals kept at least 3 months. Two counts, one ratio, and an ageing list. Defects that sit uncertified are trucks that legally should not be moving.
A driver must forward the record of duty status and its supporting documents to the home terminal within 20 days of completing it, and the motor carrier must ensure they do; the carrier must deposit them at its principal place of business within 30 days of receipt and keep them in chronological order for each driver for at least 6 months. Count how many are outstanding and how old the oldest is. This number is boring right up until an audit, at which point it is the whole conversation — see preparing for an MTO facility audit.
Every damage or shortage report starts a clock whose length is set by the originating province, because the Conditions of Carriage Regulations apply the conditions and limitations of liability of the province in which the transport originates. Where that is British Columbia, written notice of loss, damage or delay must reach the originating or delivering carrier within 60 days after delivery, or within 9 months of the shipment date where delivery failed, with the final statement of claim filed within 9 months. Track open exceptions by age against the applicable window. An exception nobody has quantified is an unpriced liability.
If you operate in Ontario, the CVOR programme reviews information including fleet size, kilometres travelled, business ownership structure, overall violation rate, safety rating, convictions, reportable collisions, Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance inspections, and ministry interventions such as letters, interviews, audits and sanctions. Every operator is assigned one of four ratings — Satisfactory, Satisfactory-unaudited, Conditional or Unsatisfactory — and the rating is available to the public. Tracking convictions, collisions and roadside inspection outcomes weekly is simply tracking your own scorecard before someone else does. British Columbia keeps an equivalent picture: the director may compile records, information and profiles of carriers covering reported accidents and the compliance of the carrier, its drivers and its vehicles.
For cross-border work, count the transmissions that went out with less than an hour to spare. In the highway mode CBSA requires cargo and conveyance data to be received and validated within 30 days and no later than one hour before arrival at the first point of arrival, and messages received under that hour are accepted but generate an “insufficient review time” warning, with penalties potentially applicable. This is a leading indicator of a planning problem, not a paperwork problem.
Revenue per available driver-hour. Not per kilometre, not per load — per hour of the resource that is actually capped. The inputs come from your own books, which you are required to keep in any case: the Income Tax Act requires every person carrying on business to keep records and books of account at their place of business in Canada, in a form that enables the taxes payable to be determined, and in British Columbia carriers must also keep a complete daily record of freight carried for compensation, showing shipper and consignee, description and quantity, distance transported, number of trips, and the rate and total charged, retained at least 3 years. Between those two records, most small fleets already hold everything needed and have never joined them up.
Worked example: the number that predicted a bad month
A seven-truck carrier reviewed its dispatch numbers weekly for a quarter. Revenue looked flat and steady. Two numbers were not.
Hours-remaining at Friday close was falling week over week for four drivers — the fleet was arriving at each weekend with less lawful capacity than the week before. At the same time, hours non-compliance events were being logged but the count of closed remedial actions was lagging behind by two to three weeks.
Neither showed up in revenue for six weeks. When it did, it arrived as three refused loads in one week, because the drivers who could legally run them had run out of cycle. The lagging remedial-action count had been telling the owner the same thing in a different language: dispatch was routinely planning to the edge.
Nothing was purchased. The Friday report simply added two columns, and the owner started reading the one everyone had assumed was a compliance chore.
Six of the eight come out of the logging system, one out of the maintenance file and one out of the customs record. The useful automation is extraction and assembly: pull the fields, join them to the driver and unit, age the open items, and produce one page every Friday. That is a reporting task and current tools are good at it.
What the tool must not do is judge. It can show that a defect is uncertified or that a remedial action is open; a person decides whether a truck runs and signs the record. Keep that line in the procedure, because the obligations sit with the carrier. If the reporting is the reason you are looking at a dispatch system, ask a vendor to show you these eight fields before anything else.
We will not give you a number. Ontario publishes the rating categories and the factors that feed them rather than a target, and any figure we invented would be exactly the kind of unsourced benchmark that gets repeated for years. Watch your own direction of travel.
Weekly for the seven operational numbers, because several attach to clocks measured in days. Monthly is fine for revenue per available driver-hour.
The obligations do not scale down. The duty to monitor compliance and record remedial action applies to the carrier regardless of size. On two trucks the page takes ten minutes.
Hours remaining per driver at Friday close. It is the cheapest to produce and the earliest to move.
Most of these eight numbers are already in your logging and freight records and have simply never been joined up.
