How HaulApp works

This page is for the owner or office manager of a dump-truck or material hauling company who has not used HaulApp yet. It walks one piece of work through the whole system: who touches it, what each step produces, and why the step exists. Each section links to the page that covers that step in detail. Terms in bold are defined in the glossary.

The flow at a glance

flowchart TD
    C[Customer] --> J[Job]
    J --> Q[Job quote<br/>material, sites, rates]
    C --> O[Order<br/>order items]
    O --> CF[Item confirmed<br/>with the customer]
    CF --> R[Release<br/>a day and a quantity]
    R --> A[Assignment<br/>truck and driver]
    A --> L[Load<br/>one truck trip]
    L --> T[Ticket<br/>photo of the scale ticket]
    T --> V{Ticket review}
    V -- approved --> CH[Charges]
    V -- held --> T
    CH --> I[Invoice]
    I --> IS[Issuance<br/>invoice frozen]
    IS --> QB[QuickBooks Desktop<br/>invoice]
    IS --> CM[Commission entries]
    CM --> P[Payable]
    P --> QBB[QuickBooks Desktop<br/>bill]

Who does what

HaulApp has three office roles and a driver role. One person can hold more than one role. See Roles and permissions for the full list.

Role	What they do	What they produce
Sales (Owner / Admin or Dispatcher role)	Records the customer, opens the job, prices the work, takes the order	Customers, jobs, job quotes, orders
Dispatcher	Confirms order items with the customer, gives them a day, puts trucks and drivers on them	Releases, dispatch plans, assignments
Driver	Accepts the assignment, runs each load in the driver app, photographs the ticket	Loads, tickets
Billing / Reviewer	Approves or holds tickets, approves charges, builds and issues invoices, prepares commission bills	Approved tickets, charges, invoices, payables
Owner / Admin	Reads money in per customer and job, money out per truck and owner-operator; connects QuickBooks	Reports, the QuickBooks connection

1. Customer, job and job quote

Sales records the customer once. A customer is the company that buys hauling, material, disposal, or a mix of them.

Sales then opens a job for each engagement with that customer. A job holds the job site, the general contractor, the contact and the customer’s reference. A job can stay open for years, so every quote, ticket and invoice for that engagement can be found in one place, on the job’s page.

Under the job, Sales prices the work as job quotes. A job quote names the material, the pickup site, the delivery site, the unit (for example tons), and the rates: what the customer pays for transport, what the customer pays for material, and what the truck is paid. A job quote is a standing price: every order the customer places on the job draws on it, and it is never used up. Sales can correct a job quote’s rates until something has been ordered at it. After that, HaulApp refuses the edit, and Sales prices the work again as a new job quote that replaces the old one. Orders already taken keep the price they were taken at.

Details: Customers, jobs and quotes.

2. Order and order items

An order is the customer’s call: what they want hauled now. The office takes it on Orders → New order while the customer is on the phone: find the customer and the job, then add order items. Each order item draws on one job quote, which sets the material, pickup site, delivery site and unit; the item adds the quantity (or no ceiling), when they need it, and the price, frozen at the quote’s rates. Tickets count against the order item they were hauled for, and the dispatcher closes the order when the customer has enough.

A new order item starts unconfirmed. Somebody calls the customer to confirm it, and HaulApp records who confirmed it and when. An item must be confirmed before it can be given a delivery day. This step exists because taking an order on the phone and checking it with the customer are two different acts.

3. Dispatch: releases, assignments and loads

Dispatch turns confirmed order items into a day’s work.

1. A release gives a confirmed order item a date and a quantity. HaulApp refuses a release that takes the item past 110% of its requested quantity, and asks for a reason for any amount over 100%.
2. On the dispatch board, the dispatcher builds the day’s plan. Each assignment puts one truck and one driver on one release.
3. There is no separate publish step: the assignment reaches the driver app as soon as the dispatcher makes it. The driver acknowledges the plan before starting a load.
4. The driver starts a load: one truck trip from pickup to delivery. The load moves through statuses such as at origin, loaded, at destination and delivered.

A load records which truck and driver ran it, so pay and reports follow the truck that actually hauled. A started load is never reassigned.

Details: Dispatch and drivers.

4. Tickets and verification

A ticket is the proof that a load happened. Most often it is a scale ticket with a weight. The driver photographs it in the driver app and types the ticket number and net quantity beside the photo.

Billing checks each ticket on Tickets → Review: the photo on one side, the typed values on the other. Billing approves the ticket, corrects a value, or holds it. Only approved tickets can be billed. This step exists because the invoice is only as good as the tickets behind it.

Details: Tickets and verification.

5. Charges

A charge is one billable amount backed by an approved ticket: haul, material, disposal, wait, hourly, surcharge or adjustment. Each charge belongs to one order item and records the ticket it came from. A charge that the ticket does not fully support is held, with the reason in words, until Billing resolves it.

Charges exist so the invoice never carries an amount that cannot be traced to a ticket.

6. Invoice and issuance

On Billing, approved charges are grouped by customer and job, and Billing creates an invoice from a group. One invoice covers one customer. Its total is the sum of its lines, and each line names the charges behind it. One order can be invoiced many times, for example once a week while the work continues.

Billing then opens the invoice and uses Review issuance, then Issue reviewed invoice. Issuance freezes the invoice, its ticket quantities and its total. After issuance nothing on the invoice is overwritten: billing corrects it by an edit (a new revision), a void, or a separate credit memo. Connected corrections need accounting review. See Correct an invoice. Issuance is also the moment commissions are earned (see step 8).

Details: Invoicing overview.

7. QuickBooks

HaulApp sends reviewed invoices to QuickBooks Desktop through QuickBooks Web Connector when accounting writes are available for the company. Billing reviews and approves invoices under Settings → QuickBooks → Invoices. Web Connector carries queued work on a later run, and HaulApp reads QuickBooks again to verify the result. If a response is lost, investigate the write before creating a replacement.

Details: QuickBooks Desktop.

8. Commissions and payables

Money out branches off the issued invoice.

• Before work starts on an order item, the office records the commission agreement for it: who earns it (a commission recipient such as a salesperson or broker), the rate and the unit.
• When an invoice is issued, HaulApp records a commission entry for each ticket on it that has an agreement.
• On Payables, Billing selects entries for one recipient and prepares a payable, a bill for what HaulApp owes that recipient. After approval, accounting can review and send it to QuickBooks Desktop or record its handoff manually.

Commissions are tied to issuance, not to the ticket, so nobody is paid a commission on work the customer was never billed for.

An owner-operator’s settlements are listed on the driver’s page under Fleet.

Details: Commissions and payables.

Imported history

When a company moves to HaulApp, its past customers, jobs, job quotes, tickets, invoices and commissions can be imported. Imported records appear in the same lists as new ones, marked with an Imported badge. They are read-only history: an imported ticket cannot be reviewed, and an imported order cannot be dispatched or invoiced again. Hauling the old system never invoiced arrives on an open order, so it can be billed in HaulApp.

Details: Importing your history.

Not supported yet

• Creating charges from approved tickets in the office app. HaulApp has the rule that checks a charge against its ticket, but no screen that runs it yet.
• Reading the ticket number and weight from the photo automatically.