Carrier and Driver Settlement Software

Shyftbase Auto Pay automates payments to service providers from calculation through disbursement, using rules you define per provider, payment schedule and contract term. It supports multiple payment methods, integrates with accounting and ERP systems including QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Odoo, SYSPRO and Workday, and keeps a complete audit trail of every payment activity.

Settlement is the part of the week nobody photographs. The loads ran, the proofs of delivery came in, and now somebody has to work out what each carrier, owner-operator and agent is owed for them — rate, accessorials, deductions, holdbacks — and get the money out before the phone starts ringing. In most operations that job lives in a spreadsheet assembled from three other spreadsheets, run on a Thursday, under time pressure, against agreements filed somewhere else. Auto Pay is the module that turns it into a set of rules the system runs instead.

What a settlement line is actually made of

A payables engine is not a payments button. Before anything can be disbursed the amount has to be built, and it is built out of four things that arrive at four different times.

The agreed rate arrives first, on the rate confirmation — the document that fixes what the move is worth before the truck turns a wheel. The accessorial charges arrive last, and they are the reason settlement is hard: detention charges, a second delivery attempt, a stair carry, a waiting hour. They are agreed after the fact, sometimes disputed, and they land days after the load has closed. Deductions run on a third clock — advances, fuel cards, insurance charged back, damage. And a holdback, where one exists, sits against the whole thing.

Federal leasing rules are unusually specific about that list. For leased equipment, the written lease has to say which party carries the cost of fuel, fuel taxes, empty mileage, permits, tolls, ferries, detention and accessorial services, and base plates and licences^[tila]. That is not a coincidence. It is the same list a settlement engine has to hold a rule for, written down by a regulator in 1979 because the arguments were already predictable then^[tila].

What the rules are allowed to vary on

Auto Pay runs a payment from calculation to disbursement on rules set in advance. The useful question is never whether a system has rules — everything has rules — but which dimensions they are allowed to vary on, because that is what decides whether your actual agreements fit inside it. Here there are three: the service provider, the payment schedule and the contract term.

A provider is whoever you contracted for the move. The counterparty classes the published copy names are service providers, carriers and agents, so whether the driver behind the wheel is settled here depends on which of those they are to you: a leased owner-operator reading a settlement statement is inside this module, and an employee on a payroll run is not — see the boundary below.

That combination is what a mixed network needs. A carrier on a weekly cycle at contracted linehaul, an agent on a monthly commission, an owner-operator on a percentage of the load with a fuel advance recovered mid-cycle — those are three rules over one ledger, not three separate processes with three separate spreadsheets and one person who understands all of them.

Conditions sit on top of the rules. A condition holds a payment until something becomes true and releases it when it does, which is what turns a settlement run from a batch job into a queue: the load missing its proof of delivery does not stop the run, it sits in one state while everything else pays. Underneath, the module records every payment activity, supports more than one payment method, and shows the run's status while it is happening rather than afterwards. It is not the book of record: the accounting or ERP system you already run stays that, which is why the integration list above matters more to a finance team than a feature count does. Multiple verification steps sit in the approval path before a disbursement releases. How many steps, and whether they are maker-checker or a value threshold, is not published — that belongs in the list of things to ask for, below.

Holds, escrow and a floor payment

Escrow and minimum pays used to be a separate module. They arrive here because they are not a separate mechanism: both are payables rules about the same thing, which is money that is owed but not yet payable.

A hold keeps a calculated amount unreleased until a defined condition is met — service completion, a document arriving, a dispute closing — and releases it automatically when the condition is satisfied, with every movement into and out of the held balance recorded.

A floor sets the minimum a provider is paid, and it varies on three dimensions of its own: the service provider, the region and the service type. Where the calculated amount for a job lands below the floor, the floor is what pays.

Then the boundary, because escrow is a word that carries duties. Where a carrier holds an escrow fund from a leased owner-operator, the lease must state the amount, the specific items the fund can be applied to, and the lessor's right to demand an accounting at any time; the carrier must account for every transaction either on the settlement sheet itself or separately each month, must pay interest at least quarterly at no less than the yield on 91-day, 13-week Treasury bills, and must return the fund no later than 45 days after termination^[tila]. Those duties fall on the carrier, not on its software. What software does is the ledger half — apply the rule, itemise the movement, produce the accounting that the rule requires. Who holds the money while it is held, in what account and under whose licence, is a question for your bank and your counsel; Shyftbase names no custodian, and you should not infer one.

The statement is where this is won or lost

A settlement statement is read by someone who was there. The driver knows how long they sat at the dock; the agent knows which loads were theirs. An unexplained deduction on a statement does not produce a support ticket, it produces a phone call, and enough of them produce a carrier who stops answering.

For leased equipment the regulation already dictates part of what the statement has to carry. Where a provider's revenue is a percentage of gross revenue, the carrier must give them a copy of the rated freight bill at or before settlement, and whatever the compensation method, the provider may examine the documents the rates and charges were computed from^[tila]. Chargebacks must be named in the lease in advance, with a recitation of how each one is computed, and the provider is entitled to copies of the documents needed to test whether the charge is valid^[tila]. A deduction for cargo or property damage requires a written explanation and itemisation delivered before the deduction is made^[tila]. And the lease must specify that payment follows within 15 days of the necessary delivery documents being submitted^[tila].

Read those as product requirements rather than as law and they describe one artefact: a line-by-line statement, per provider, per period, in which every addition and every deduction carries both the rule that produced it and the document that justifies it. That is the job the audit trail does. It is also what a dispute has to sit on — documentation, a route for the disagreement, a reconciliation that closes it, and a complete transaction history behind all three, so the argument is about the facts rather than about whose spreadsheet is newer.

How to evaluate a settlement system

Buying one of these is mostly a documents exercise. Six questions separate the systems that hold up from the ones that demo well.

1. Ask for a real settlement statement, from a real week, for a provider paid on a percentage. Read it as the provider would. If you cannot reconstruct the arithmetic from the page, neither can they.
2. Ask what happens to a late accessorial. The detention claim that arrives after the period has closed either reopens that period, posts as an adjustment on the next one, or gets keyed by hand. All three are defensible; only one of them matches how you close a month.
3. Ask which deductions can post without a document attached. The answer should be none, and the demo should show you where the document is stored.
4. Ask who can override a rule, and where the override shows up. An override that is not in the audit trail is a hole in the ledger with a person standing in it.
5. Ask what happens at termination — how the final statement is produced, when held balances return, and which deductions may still be applied against them.
6. Ask what it does not do, and see whether you get a straight answer. The list below is ours.

What this does not do

It is not payroll. Auto Pay calculates and disburses what a provider is owed. It does not withhold income tax, run employee payroll or file information returns. Under the current IRS instructions a payer files a Form 1099-NEC for each non-employee paid at least $2,000 in a year for services performed^[irs]; that filing, and the classification decision behind it, stays with your accounting or payroll system.

It is not a bank and it is not an escrow agent. No payment rail, settlement timing, currency list or country list is published for this module. If the question is how fast the money lands, the answer is set by the rail you settle on and the bank behind it, not by the software that calculates the amount.

It is not freight audit. This is the payable side: what you owe out, to providers you contracted. Checking the carrier invoices that arrive at you is a different problem with different failure modes. The receivables side — invoicing your customers, and the rate cards those invoices are built from — is Auto Billing.

It cannot settle against an agreement nobody wrote down. A rate agreed by phone, a detention allowance that "everyone knows", an accessorial applied at a dispatcher's discretion: none of them can be turned into a rule. The first month of a settlement project is usually spent turning handshakes into rate records, and that work is not the software's.

It does not decide what is fair. A floor pays what you configured it to pay. Whether that number is right for a region, a service type or a market is a commercial decision the system will execute either way.

The security posture is stated, not certified. Multiple verification steps and a complete audit trail are what this module documents. No certification, standard or audit report is named here, because none has been published. If your finance team requires one, ask for it by name before you shortlist, and treat any vendor who answers that question with an adjective as having declined to answer it.