Ask a dispatcher how their day went and you’ll usually get a laugh before an answer. Most days don’t go according to any plan they made at 6 a.m. A driver’s running late to a pickup, a broker wants a check call they already gave twenty minutes ago, and somebody’s still waiting on a rate confirmation that was supposed to go out before lunch. By the time you add it all up, dispatching isn’t one job. It’s five jobs wearing one name badge.
If you’re running 10 to 75 power units, you already know the symptom: your dispatcher is buried, you’re afraid to add another truck because you don’t know who’d handle the extra load, and hiring a second dispatcher feels like the only lever left. Before you pull that lever, it’s worth actually mapping where the hours go. Most fleets have never done this. They just know the day is full.
The short answer: audit a week of the dispatcher’s time, then automate the high-frequency, low-judgment work first — check calls (replace with live GPS), load-to-truck matching (use a ranked shortlist), and paperwork chasing (keep RateCons and PODs on the load) — before you add headcount.
Where the Hours Actually Go
Pull a dispatcher aside for a real conversation, not a status check, and the day breaks into a handful of buckets.
Finding and matching loads. Whether it’s inbound freight from a handful of shippers or working the load boards, somebody has to look at what’s available, figure out which truck is closest, and decide if the rate covers the deadhead. This is judgment work, and it’s slow when it’s done from memory and gut feel instead of numbers on a screen.
Chasing status. Where’s the truck. Did the driver check in at the shipper. Are they still sitting on the dock racking up detention. A dispatcher covering 20 trucks might make dozens of check calls a day if there’s no other way to see truck position, and every one of those calls is a driver pulled off the road to answer a phone he shouldn’t have to answer.
Paperwork chase. RateCons that need to go out, get signed, and come back before a truck rolls. PODs that need to be collected before a load can be invoiced. Missing paperwork is the single biggest reason settlements and invoicing slip a week, and dispatchers end up doing the chasing because nobody else is positioned to catch it early.
Firefighting. A truck breaks down. A load falls off a dedicated lane. A driver calls in sick on a Tuesday with three stops booked. None of this is on the schedule, and none of it waits for a slow day to happen.
Assignment and communication. Actually telling drivers what to do next, confirming they got the message, and re-confirming when something changes mid-route.
Notice that almost none of this list is “driving trucks around.” It’s coordination overhead. And coordination overhead is exactly the kind of work that piles up invisibly until a dispatcher is working twelve-hour days just to keep pace with a 30-truck fleet.
The Instinct to Hire Is Usually Wrong
When the workload gets unmanageable, the default move is to add a second dispatcher. Sometimes that’s the right call — real growth eventually needs real headcount. But before you go there, look at how much of the current workload is actually manual re-entry and phone-based status checking rather than decisions that need a human brain.
A dispatcher spending three hours a day on check calls isn’t dispatching. They’re relaying information that a GPS ping could deliver automatically. A dispatcher re-typing the same load details into a rate confirmation, then again into an invoice, then again into a settlement, isn’t making judgment calls — they’re doing data entry three times over for the same shipment. That’s not a headcount problem. That’s a tooling problem, and it’s the kind of thing that gets worse, not better, when you add a second person doing the same manual process.
What to Automate First
Not everything is worth fixing at once. Start with the tasks that are high-frequency and low-judgment — the stuff that happens dozens of times a day and doesn’t require a dispatcher’s actual expertise to complete.
Check calls top that list almost every time. If drivers are carrying a phone with GPS on, or running an ELD like Samsara, there’s no reason a dispatcher should be calling for a location update. Live tracking from the driver’s phone or an ELD feed answers “where’s my truck” before anyone has to ask it out loud — see how to track a load without calling the driver.
Load-to-truck matching is next. This is where a lot of the mental math lives — which truck is closest, what’s the deadhead, does the rate clear the cost of getting there. An AI dispatcher that ranks drivers and carriers for a load by deadhead and margin does that math for them, so a dispatcher is choosing from a short list instead of scanning a board and guessing. (The same math is the core of reducing deadhead and empty miles.)
And the actual dispatch board matters more than most fleets give it credit for. A drag-and-drop board that shows every truck, every load, and every open slot in one view replaces the sticky notes, whiteboards, and side spreadsheets that dispatchers build for themselves because the “real” system doesn’t show them what they need. The dispatch board and AI Dispatcher (on higher plans) in Techvia TMS are built around exactly this problem: a drag-and-drop board with live status and filters, and a ranked shortlist of drivers and carriers with ETA and one-click assign — not to replace the dispatcher’s judgment, but to hand them a shorter, better list to work from so the judgment calls that are left are the ones that actually matter.
Judgment Calls Are the Job — Protect Them
The goal isn’t to make dispatch fully automatic. Freight has too many exceptions for that — weather delays, broken-down trailers, a shipper who changes the appointment window three times in one afternoon. Judgment calls are the actual job, and they’re the part a good dispatcher is genuinely good at.
The goal is separating judgment work from busywork, so the person doing the job spends their hours on decisions instead of data entry. A dispatcher who isn’t burning the morning on check calls has room to actually think about which lane is losing money and which driver is about to run out of hours. That’s a better use of a skilled person than anything a spreadsheet or a phone tree can do.
Start With a Time Audit, Not a Hire
Before you post a job listing for a second dispatcher, spend a week writing down what your current one actually does, hour by hour. You’ll probably find that a third or more of the day is check calls, re-typed paperwork, and manual status chasing — work that automation handles better and faster than a person on the phone ever will.
If that’s what you find, look at Techvia TMS. The dispatch board, live GPS tracking, and AI Dispatcher (on higher plans) are built to take the repetitive matching and status-chasing off a dispatcher’s plate, at $49 a month with unlimited users and trucks — no per-seat cost as you add dispatchers. There’s a 30-day free trial, no credit card required, so you can run it against a real week of dispatching before you decide anything.