Driver timesheets and payroll for trucking companies
Timesheets built from the check-ins and checkouts that already happened — not from a shoebox of paper tickets on a Friday night.
The Friday problem
Payroll shouldn’t take your Friday night.
In most small fleets the week ends the same way. Paper tickets come off the dash, some are creased and some are missing, and someone sits down to turn them into hours. Drivers remember a start time differently than the ticket shows. A job that ran late never got written down. By the time payroll is out, two hours are gone and at least one number is a guess.
The problem is not the arithmetic. It is that the hours were never recorded when they happened — they are being reconstructed days later from paper and memory.
Strmlne FLT records them at the moment they happen instead. The driver checks in when the job starts and checks out when it ends, from their own phone, and the day’s timesheet is built from those records.
What changes
- Before
- Paper tickets, a spreadsheet, and a Friday night of retyping.
- After
- Timesheets generated daily from the check-ins and checkouts that already happened.
- Disputes
- Every entry has a time and a location behind it, so a questioned hour has an answer.
- Pay models
- Hourly, or per load / ton-mile.
How it works
From the truck to the pay run.
Nothing here asks a driver to fill in a form at the end of the week. The timesheet is a by-product of the work being dispatched and closed out.
Check-in starts the clock
When the driver checks in from their phone, FLT records the time and the location automatically.
Checkout stops it
Checkout closes the job and writes the hours against that driver and that truck for the day.
Daily timesheets
Timesheets generate every day from those records, so you are never rebuilding a whole week at once.
Hourly or per load
Hourly work is paid off the real clock. Per-load and ton-mile work is paid off what the job actually moved.
Payroll-ready at period end
At the end of the period the hours are already counted and attributed — ready to feed straight into payroll.
Ask instead of digging
Ask FLT Assist to pull a driver’s timesheet in plain language rather than clicking through menus.
Paying drivers
Hourly vs. ton-mile, and why it matters for payroll.
How you pay changes what you have to be able to prove.
Paying by the hour
Hourly is the simpler arrangement to run and the easier one to dispute. The driver is on the clock from the time they start until the time they finish, including the waiting that dump trucking is full of — queued at the pit, queued at the site. If your record of that clock is a handwritten ticket, every disagreement comes down to whose memory is better. If it is a check-in and checkout with a time and a location attached, it does not.
Paying by the load or ton-mile
Paying for what moved pushes the risk of a slow day onto the driver and the reward of a fast one too. It needs a trustworthy count of loads per truck per day, which is exactly the kind of number that goes missing when it lives on paper. In FLT the loads are counted against the job as it runs, so payroll and invoicing draw on the same figure.
Plenty of fleets run both, on different jobs and sometimes on the same day. The point is not which one is correct — it is that whichever you use, the number should come out of the dispatch record rather than out of a reconstruction.
See also: dump truck dispatch software.
Questions
Straight answers.
How are the timesheets created?
From the driver's own check-ins and checkouts. When a driver starts a job they check in from their phone and FLT records the time and location; when they finish they check out. Timesheets generate daily from those records rather than being typed up at the end of the week.
Can I pay some drivers hourly and others by the load?
Yes. FLT supports hourly pay and per-load or ton-mile pay, and the dispatch record carries what each job needs, so both can run in the same fleet.
What happens when a driver disputes their hours?
Each entry has the check-in and checkout behind it, with a time and a location, so you can show where the number came from instead of arguing from memory.
Does this replace my payroll software?
No. FLT produces the hours and loads that payroll needs, ready to feed into your pay run. It is the counting and the proof, not the tax calculation.
Do drivers have to fill in a timesheet?
No. Checking in and out is the timesheet. There is no separate form at the end of the week.
Keep reading
More of the system.
Next step
Get your Friday night back.
Tell us how you build timesheets today and we will show you what the same week looks like in FLT.