The demo went well. A map full of moving dots, a dashboard in four colours, a bilty printed in two clicks. The owner nodded, the office signed, and three months later the accountant is still typing every bill into Tally by hand while the dispatch team keeps a WhatsApp group for the questions the software cannot answer.
Our view is simple: choose a TMS on what happens to an LR after it is printed, not on how the map looks in the demo. The map is the easy part. The money sits in the paperwork that follows the truck.
The money sits in the chain after the bilty
A transporter is paid for consignments, and every consignment walks a long chain. Booking, vehicle placement, e-way bill, trip advance, delivery, POD, bill, receipt, trip settlement and the journal entry. A system that handles the first two steps beautifully and leaves the rest to Excel has digitised the cheapest part of your office.
So ask every vendor the same thing: show me one LR moving through all ten steps, and show me which steps someone retypes. Count the retypes. That number tells you more than any feature list.
Ask for your messiest trip, not their cleanest
Every demo trip is perfect. One consignment, one vehicle, one driver, delivered on time. Your real trips are not like that, so bring three of them to the meeting:
- A trip where the vehicle changed halfway and the e-way bill Part-B had to follow it.
- A part-load trip with three consignments for three customers on different billing cycles.
- A trip with a driver advance, a FASTag top-up, a challan and a detention claim.
Ask the vendor to enter them live, or ask how the system would treat each one. Hesitation is useful information. A vendor who has built for Indian transport will know the answers before you finish the sentence.
E-way bill handling shows whether a vendor knows the trade
The e-way bill is where generic logistics software usually gives itself away. Generating one is not hard. Keeping it valid is. Ask what happens when the vehicle changes, when a bill is close to expiry while the goods are still moving, and when a bill needs to be cancelled inside the 24-hour window.
A serious answer covers Part-B updates, extensions filed before expiry rather than after, alerts for bills that are about to lapse, and closure on delivery. Our guide to e-way bill software for transporters lists the specific checks. If the vendor's answer is "your staff can log in to the portal", you are buying a printer, not a system.
Accounts must post from documents, or you have bought a second register
This is the question most buyers forget. When a bill, a receipt or a trip settlement is saved, does it post its own accounting entry, or does someone export a sheet at month end and key it again? Two registers mean two versions of the truth, and the CA will always believe the second one.
Ask whether every financial document posts a balanced entry when it is saved, how GST and TDS are handled, and what your CA receives. If you plan to keep Tally, ask how the export works and test it on a real month. We set out the trade-offs in Tally vs transport software.
An illustrative cost of retyping
Here is a simple, made-up example. Say a transporter runs 40 trucks and books 25 LRs a day. Each LR is typed once at booking, once more into the billing sheet and a third time into the accounts.
| Item | Illustrative figure |
|---|---|
| LRs booked per day | 25 |
| Extra entries per LR (bill sheet, accounts) | 2 |
| Minutes per extra entry | 2 |
| Minutes lost per day | 25 × 2 × 2 = 100 |
| Working days per month | 26 |
| Hours lost per month | 100 × 26 ÷ 60 ≈ 43 |
Forty-three hours is roughly one person's working week, every month, spent copying numbers that already exist. And that is before counting the errors. If one entry in fifty goes in wrong, that is about 26 mismatches a month for someone to find before the customer does. Your own figures will differ. The arithmetic is the point.
Every number your team types twice is a number that can disagree with itself.
Ask who will actually use it, and on what
A TMS fails quietly when the people who know what happened never touch it. Drivers know the POD is signed. Branch staff know the truck is at the gate. Customers want to know where their goods are. If the only way in is a desktop login at head office, the office becomes a call centre again.
Ask how a driver sends a POD, how a customer checks a status, and in which languages. Ask whether answers come from the records or from someone reading them out. Then ask what each user is allowed to see, because a driver should not see your customer rates.
The case for keeping it simple
There is a fair argument against all of this. A transporter with six trucks, where the owner books every load and knows every driver, may not need a full system. A bilty app and a good accountant can work well at that size, and a large TMS would add screens nobody opens.
We agree, up to a point. The test is not fleet size. It is whether one person still holds the whole chain in their head. Once bookings, billing and accounts sit with different people, the gaps between them start costing money, and that is when the questions above matter. Price matters too. Our note on TMS pricing in India explains how to compare quotes on yearly cost rather than the headline number.
One more question to ask every vendor: how do you get your data out if you leave? A clean export of LRs, bills, receipts and ledgers is a sign of a vendor who expects to keep you by being useful.
What to do this week
- Pick three of last month's messiest trips and write down every place their details were typed.
- Count the retypes per LR. Multiply by your daily bookings.
- Write the ten-step chain from booking to journal entry and mark who owns each step today.
- Send those three trips to every vendor on your shortlist and ask them to walk through them live.
- Ask each vendor for a sample data export before you sign.
We built SCM for Transporter around that chain, from LR to the journal entry it posts, and the SCM for Transporter guides go deeper on each step. Whichever system you choose, choose it on your own trips.