Nobody Demos the Small Stuff. You Live in It.
Two weeks ago we wrote that something big is coming. It still is. This post is about the other kind of work.
Nobody switches software over a search box. Nobody books a demo to see a dropdown. But the people who run a trucking office touch those things hundreds of times a shift, and every one that's slightly wrong costs ten seconds, or ten minutes, or a phone call at 2 AM that didn't need to happen.
A feature is something you'd show in a demo. A small thing is something you'd notice the day it broke.
Almost everything below started as one sentence from someone using Strivie: "let me type it, don't make me scroll." "Show me who's running late." "Don't wake me up for an ETA that moved five minutes." We'll start with the newest, because the last piece of it went live this week.
The Night Desk, Rebuilt by the Night Desk
We introduced the After Hours board in July: every active driver on one screen, with their hours-of-service clocks, a click-to-dial phone number and the day shift's notes. It was built for whoever holds the phone overnight. Since then, the people who actually hold that phone have told us what was missing. Over the last week, almost all of it landed.
Running late, one click. A red Running late button with a count sits at the top of the board. Press it and the list drops to the drivers whose next stop is at risk or already late. A stop someone has already checked doesn't count, and neither does one the truck has already reached. It works together with the other filters, so "running late, in transit, one dispatcher's drivers" is three clicks.
Colours that mean something. Pickup and delivery each get their own column: the appointment window in the stop's own time zone, when the truck actually got there, when it left, and the live ETA while it's on the way. The label comes from those real times. Green when the ETA is inside the window. Orange when it's up to an hour past. Red beyond that, or when the window has closed and the truck isn't there.
Mark OK. The receiver says they're open until six and late is fine. You press Mark OK, type that in, and the stop turns green: Checked OK, with your name, the time and your note. The next person on the desk doesn't call the same receiver again, and day shift can see it was handled. If the ETA gets worse after that, the colour comes back on its own. Undo is one click, and both land in the load's history.
Where the truck is, in trip order. A small Now block shows the truck's position in plain words — "12 mi N of Evansville, IN" — with its speed or "Stopped" and how old the reading is. While the truck is heading to the shipper, it sits before the pickup. Once it's loaded, it moves between the two stops. Read the row left to right and you know where the trip stands. Positions refresh every minute and turn amber when they're more than two hours old. One click opens the live map, with a Tracking link button that copies the broker tracking link, ready to paste.
The broker thread, right there. The envelope on a driver's row opens the load's email chain with the broker — the same thread the rate con came in on — in one scroll, not a stack of little boxes. Reply in the thread and attach the load's documents with one click. A strip at the top says whether automatic broker updates are on for this load and what went out last.
The load opens on top of the board. For people allowed to see rate confirmations, the load number opens the full load window right over the board, and a Rate con button next to it opens the rate confirmation. Close the load and you're exactly where you were, filters and all.
Day shift's notes, where night shift looks. Dispatcher notes show as an amber note icon on the load. Internal notes — the ones with files attached — now sit right beside it as a violet lock with a count. Hover to read who wrote what, and when.
Finding one driver out of forty. Status buttons with counts: Booked, Awaiting PU, At shipper, In transit, At receiver, No active load. A search box that takes a driver, truck, trailer, load number or phone. A dispatcher picker. Sortable columns. And with nothing picked, the board sorts itself by urgency: drivers on detention first, then low hours, then loads on the road.
Alerts that know when you're on. Two new alerts, both with a phone push: ETA changed, and Driver left the shipper or receiver — that one so the desk can ask for the paperwork while the driver is still in the lot. An admin picks who gets them in Admin Panel → Alerts and sets each person's own hours, in their own time zone. An overnight window like 6 PM to 6 AM works. Outside those hours, nothing. They're also built not to cry wolf: an ETA has to change colour or move by half an hour before anyone hears about it, a flip caused only by a GPS dropout doesn't count, and an old departure that just got recorded doesn't fire.
One more from the night desk, and it's where the rest of this post comes from. Issuing a money code at 3 AM meant scrolling through every driver in the company to find the one on the phone. Someone on the desk said it plainly: let me type it. So we did — and not only there.
Search That Finds What You Meant
Every person dropdown types. Eighteen of them, from the money-code dialog to fuel-card assignment, claims, inspections, the dispatch board filter and Admin Panel → Permissions. Start typing a name, press Enter, done. The "none" option is still there when you need to clear the field.
Search boxes stopped being picky. A load number pasted with a trailing space used to find nothing. A driver saved with two spaces in their name couldn't be found by the name the screen showed. Now extra spaces don't matter, names match in any order — "lopez maria" finds Maria Elena Lopez — accents fold, so "Castaneda" finds "Castañeda", and phone numbers match by their digits, however they're typed. That covers Loads, Trucks, Trailers, Maintenance, Documents, Payroll, Billing, Recruiting, Safety and the search at the top of every page.
A page that failed says so. When a page couldn't load its data, it used to look exactly like a page with nothing to show: no loads, no drivers. That's worse than an error, because you believe it. Now a failed load says it failed.
Loads That Explain Themselves
Multi-stop loads show where they are. A load with two drops used to say "In Transit" from the first pickup to the last delivery. Now a small line under the status says Delivered 1/2 · In transit to Austin, on the Loads list and the Dispatch View, stamped by GPS as the truck reaches each stop. The status itself didn't change. The line just answers the question everybody was asking anyway.
A load asks before it saves a bad address. Rate cons are messy. Sometimes a sentence of fine print lands in the shipper field, or the city comes through blank. Saving a load now checks the stops: an empty or garbled city, a missing state, a state that disagrees with the address's own ZIP line, a shipper name that's really rate-con text, two identical stops. If something looks off you get Check the pickup and delivery, with Fix the stops or Save anyway. It's a question, not a wall.
Route weather on the truck's clock. The weather along a load's route used to assume the truck left at 8 AM on pickup day and rolled evenly toward noon on delivery day. Now each point's forecast time comes from where the truck actually is and the same pace the ETA uses, overnight stops included. The part of the route already behind the truck drops off.
DH-D on the load board. Searching toward a destination? A new DH-D column shows how far each load's delivery lands from where you wanted to end up, on every connected broker. It's straight-line miles, city to city, with "≈" when a city had to be placed by name.
Every board in the header. Each load-board broker now has a chip at the top of the board: green when it's set up and its login works, amber when it isn't, with the reason on hover. You find out a login expired before you start wondering why one board has gone quiet.
The Yard and the Pump
One QR sticker per truck, for good. Every truck can carry a permanent QR sticker in the cab. Scan it and it opens the binder — the assigned driver's binder when there is one, the truck's own when there isn't. Drivers change and documents get renewed; the sticker keeps working. From the Trucks page, Print QR stickers makes one PDF for the whole fleet, a 4×6 page per truck.
What the pump wants. A carrier reset a driver's fuel card PIN by hand, and the pump still said no. The reason: that card's pump prompt was asking for a Driver ID, not the card PIN, and the two have nothing to do with each other. The Fuel Cards table now has a Pump asks for column — Driver ID or unit number, and which field in the driver's profile it comes from. The PIN button is now called Set WEX card PIN, and it says what it does and doesn't change.
Every driver notification rings the phone. If something lands in a driver's notification list in the driver app, it now arrives as a push on their phone too. Nothing sits unread in a tab nobody opened.
What We Won't Say
None of this is a reason to switch software, and that's not what it's for. It's the difference between a tool you put up with and one that gets out of the way.
The After Hours board can only show what the data has. A truck with a wrong VIN has no position. A stop with no appointment window gets no colour. Hours-of-service clocks update within about five minutes of a duty-status change and hourly otherwise — every five minutes once a driver is under an hour — so an hour-old clock is normal, and the board says so when one is older than that. The new alerts stay off until an admin adds people to them. And Mark OK doesn't call the receiver for you. Somebody still has to pick up the phone.
DH-D is a straight line, not road miles. The stop check is a question, and "Save anyway" is still a button.
The list isn't finished, because it never is. Most of what's here started as one sentence from someone using Strivie, so keep sending them. The big thing is still coming — the small ones don't wait for it. If you'd rather watch than read, the three-minute After Hours tutorial is right below.