Plan a trip is Loadful's planner. Tell it which truck, which dates, and where the run starts and ends, and it searches the Super Dispatch board itself and comes back with a few candidate trips — each one a set of cars riding together on one trailer, priced after the empty miles home.
It plans by the deck, not the load. Most of the board is single-car freight that is correctly a pass on its own and clears your cost comfortably when it rides with two or three others going the same way. Profit belongs to the trailer, so that is what the planner prices.
Before you plan
- Server sync must be connected. The planner searches the board from Loadful's own Super Dispatch session — you do not need a browser open on the board.
- The truck needs a cost model. Every figure is priced against it.
- Synced trips make the yardstick: the strip above the results is your own last 90 days — loads and cars per trip, revenue and net per mile, deadhead share. It stays empty until your trips are synced.
Plan a run
- Open Planning → Plan a trip and pick the truck.
- Set Out, Back by, From and To, then press Plan. The cities default to the rig's home base, and nothing re-plans until you press it.
- Click Search the board & plan. Loadful searches Super Dispatch and builds the candidate trips; it takes a few minutes. You can leave the page — the finished search is offered when you come back.
- Read each trip's net after the drive home and the dispatch fee, not its gross, and the day it gets home. Every trip is scheduled with driving time, loading time, the federal hours rules and any wait for a car's pickup date, and a trip that cannot be home by Back by is not shown. Open the cost breakdown when a number looks off.
- Commit the trip you will run. Its loads leave the planning pool so they are never planned onto a second trip, and the P&L costs it like any other.
- Request each load on Super Dispatch from the links in the commit dialog or the Committed panel, then mark each one Won or Lost. Loadful never requests a load for you — you press Super Dispatch's own button.
- Deck
- the set of cars riding on one trailer at the same time.
- After the drive home
- every figure includes the empty miles back to your yard.
- Deadhead share
- the portion of a trip's miles carrying nothing. The same rate can pay at 12% deadhead and lose at 40%.
Seeing the week
Trips → Calendar lays your synced trips out by driver and by day: one bar per trip from its start to its last dated stop, with pickups and deliveries ticked. Use it to see who is free on a given day and whose runs overlap, then plan into the gaps.
Planned trips are estimates built from the board as it stood when you searched. Postings move, and the weight, hours and route constraints you work under are yours to check — see Security & privacy for what Loadful is and is not.