Between October and early November 2022, I built a trucking operations tool for a company that needed cleaner driver time tracking and a lot less payroll cleanup.
The users were drivers on the road and carrier admins back at the office. Drivers needed a dead simple way to clock into a load, clock out when it was done, and attach the extra stuff payroll always misses. Admins needed one place to review everything before it turned into payroll.
Business Impact
- Cut weekly payroll prep from roughly 5.5 hours down to about 75 minutes
- Reduced missing, disputed, or incomplete trip records by 16%
- Shortened reimbursement and accessorial approval turnaround from weeks to days
The Problem
The problem went past hours. It included all the little line items that pile up in trucking.
- Start and end times were easy to miss or log late
- Extra pay like detention, TONU, per diem, and lumper charges had to be tracked separately
- Receipts for reimbursements were easy to lose
- Payroll teams had to manually piece together hours, extras, and expenses before they could pay anyone
- Admins had no clean approval layer between what drivers submitted and what payroll exported
So the same thing happened every week: payroll took too long, small mistakes turned into annoying disputes, and the back office had to reconstruct work that had already happened.
What I Built
I built a full-stack app with separate workflows for drivers and carrier admins.
- Driver clock in and clock out tied to a trip record
- Load ID tracking per trip
- Start and finish stops with timestamps, timezone awareness, and GPS or IP-based location capture
- Editable stop times when a correction was needed
- Reimbursement submission with receipt uploads
- Accessorial submission tied to a trip, including detention, TONU, per diem, lumper, and other charges
- Driver onboarding for carrier admins, including wage rate and payroll type setup
- Approval queues for trips, reimbursements, and accessorials
- Payroll batch generation that pulled approved line items into one calculation
- CSV payroll exports split by 1099 and W-2
- Stripe-based banking setup for drivers
The core workflow was straightforward:
Driver clocks into a load
-> system records start time, timezone, and location
-> driver clocks out when the trip is done
-> driver adds reimbursements or accessorial pay with receipts
-> carrier admin reviews and approves outstanding line items
-> system batches approved trips, extras, and reimbursements into payroll
-> admin downloads payroll exports and drivers complete banking setup
Outcome
By the end, this was more than a punch clock. It was a working back-office tool for a trucking company: drivers could log real trip activity as it happened, admins could approve it, and payroll could finally run off something cleaner than memory, texts, and spreadsheet cleanup.