QUESTIONS, ANSWERED

DeliveryLinx is a transportation management system (TMS) built for the prime-contractor model in final-mile and freight: you win the contract from a carrier or shipper, you subcontract the routes to independent drivers, and you live or die on the spread between what you invoice and what you pay. DeliveryLinx runs that entire back office on one engine. From the daily stop or load file it produces the customer invoice and every vendor bill, prices each side off zone-based rate cards, shows you margin down to the individual stop, runs a live dispatch board with GPS and driver comms, captures proof of delivery, and keeps your subcontractors' insurance and licensing audit-ready. It replaces the stack most contractors run today: Excel for billing, a group text for dispatch, a filing cabinet for compliance, and a spreadsheet of rates nobody trusts.

Final-mile, last-mile, courier, line-haul, and LTL contractors who win a contract and subcontract the routes. The tell is simple: if you invoice a customer at one rate card and pay your subcontractors at a different one, with negotiated per-vendor exceptions for things like marketing fees, uniform fees, and premium pay, you are exactly who this was built for. It fits a single-territory operator with a handful of drivers and scales to a multi-market shop running fifty-plus subcontractors without changing how anything works.

Most operators run a real billing cycle on day one. The setup is three things: map your zips to zones (your 'donut' tiers), load your customer and subcontractor rate cards, and add your subcontractors. Then drop your first daily file and the invoices and vendor bills generate on the first pass. There is no multi-week implementation, no professional-services invoice, and no per-seat onboarding fee. We recommend tying your first week of output back to your existing hand-built spreadsheet so you can confirm it reconciles to the penny before you trust it, then never open that spreadsheet again.

No. DeliveryLinx ingests the stop or route export your carrier already produces, even the ugly one-day-at-a-time exports that omit the delivery date and bury the zip inside a free-text address. GLS files are recognized automatically. For any other carrier (FedEx, Amazon, UPS, or your own format), the upload wizard reads your column headers and auto-maps them to the billing fields, so you do not have to set anything up by hand. You pick the market and date at upload and the parser does the rest. Nothing upstream has to change for you to go live.

Yes. There is a live, no-login driver demo at /demo. It runs the actual driver field experience right in your browser: scan packages with the camera, snap a photo, capture a signature, and complete the stop, exactly what your drivers see. Nothing is saved. It is the fastest way to feel how eyes-up and simple the driver side is.

Today the manual flow is: open the daily file, hand-type the delivery date, run a VLOOKUP to pull the zip out of the address, run a second VLOOKUP to map zip to zone, then build pivot tables to total it for the customer invoice and a separate set to total it for each subcontractor bill. DeliveryLinx collapses all of that into one upload. It parses the file, resolves every zip to its zone, applies your customer rate card and each subcontractor's rate card line by line, and writes the invoice and the vendor bills in a single transaction. It dedupes by file hash and by (market, date) so you can never double-bill the same day, and the output reconciles to the penny against your old workbook.

Rates are zone-based: concentric zones (the 'donuts') radiate out from your hub, every zip maps to a zone, and each zone carries a rate for every line kind, delivery stops, pieces, premium, pickups, linehaul, fuel, marketing fee, uniform fee, scan tiers, bonuses, claims, and more. There are two sides to every line kind, the customer (your revenue) and the subcontractor (your cost). The customer side is one rate per zone across the market. The subcontractor side has a market default plus per-vendor overrides, because marketing fees, uniform fees, and premium pay are usually negotiated driver by driver. Every rate is effective-dated, so when the carrier changes your tariff or a vendor renegotiates, history is preserved and old periods stay correct.

Yes. DeliveryLinx generates NetSuite-ready customer invoices (one per market per period) and vendor bills (one per subcontractor per period), each carrying our internal ID as an idempotent external ID so a retry never creates a duplicate. They land in NetSuite as drafts your AP and AR teams approve, never posting to your ledger automatically. A nightly reconciliation can pull invoice status back (Open vs Paid) so your dashboard reflects what has actually cleared.

It is flagged, not dropped. Unresolved zips surface in a queue with the raw address so you can map them in one click, which also teaches the system for next time. You always know your billed total is complete, because nothing silently falls out of the file.

Margin is revenue minus cost at the stop level, and DeliveryLinx rolls that up to route, zone, territory, and the whole portfolio for any date range you pick. The dashboard flags your low-margin markets, your unpriced stops, your missing PODs, and your compliance exposure on one screen. The point is to answer the question every multi-market operator has: why is one territory running at fifty percent gross margin and another at four, with the same customer and the same playbook. Density-versus-margin views and per-vendor cost outliers tell you which zones to re-bid and which rates are stale before the next contract cycle, instead of finding out at year-end.

They are two views of the same loads for two different jobs. The dispatch board is the live operations command center: a war-room map with continuously updating GPS, filter tiles for what is covered and what is at risk, a comms monitor, and one-tap access to message or call any driver as the day runs. The load board is the financial and planning view: KPIs, revenue and margin by lane and by carrier, charts, filters, and saved 'My Views' so a dispatcher can open straight to their slice. Same data, no double entry, two purpose-built screens.

Yes. A lane can carry multiple destinations (Destination 1, 2, 3 and beyond) and the board tracks the truck through each one with live GPS. It runs FTL, LTL, linehaul, and heavy-haul on the same board as your final-mile routes, so a mixed operation sees everything in one place rather than juggling a freight tool and a final-mile tool.

Yes. Set up a recurring schedule (a lane, a carrier and driver, and the days of the week it runs) and DeliveryLinx builds and assigns those loads automatically, 14 days ahead and every morning after, so a daily or weekly lane never has to be created by hand. You can pause, resume, or delete a schedule any time; deleting only stops future generation and leaves the loads already created intact.

The paperwork is attached to the load, not retyped into a separate system. From the load you generate a branded rate confirmation and a Bill of Lading, send them to the carrier, and the driver captures the signed BOL and proof from their phone at each stop. Every document is attributed to the lane and the carrier it belongs to, so when the lane closes, settlement and customer billing run off the same record dispatch was already looking at.

Every trip has one unified thread, and it is the single source of truth for that load. It carries in-app messages, SMS (so a driver with no app still gets and sends updates), email, voice notes, and automatic board events, all in time order. Voice notes are transcribed automatically and kept next to the original audio, so the conversation is searchable by what was said and stays auditable later. Drivers opt in to the notifications they want. Because everything lands on the load, the next dispatcher on shift sees the entire history instead of scrolling a personal text thread or asking 'who talked to this driver last.'

DeliveryLinx texts are operational only (load assignments, dispatch updates, delivery and pickup status, deadline reminders), never marketing. Contracted drivers and carriers opt in by checking a consent box when they accept an assigned load or during onboarding, by texting JOIN to the DeliveryLinx number, or on the public opt-in page at deliverylinx.com/sms-opt-in. The consent box and that page state the message types, that message frequency varies with load activity, and that message and data rates may apply, and they link to the SMS terms and privacy policy. Anyone can reply STOP to any message to opt out instantly, or HELP for help. Mobile opt-in data and consent are never shared with third parties. Full SMS terms are at deliverylinx.com/messaging.

Safety is a core differentiator, not an afterthought. A dead-man check-in timer asks the driver to confirm they are OK on a set cadence (default every 60 minutes); a check-in is a one-tap button, a hands-free voice command ("I'm here, DeliveryLinx"), or simply a fresh GPS ping. If a trip goes quiet past its interval, the system escalates to dispatch with the last-known location and flags the load on the board, so a silent driver is noticed in minutes, not hours. Drivers can also send a hands-light voice note that is automatically transcribed into the trip thread, so they keep their eyes on the road instead of typing. There is an SOS panic button that captures the driver's GPS location, alerts dispatch immediately, and surfaces 911. Dispatch messages can be read back aloud with text-to-speech so a driver hears the update rather than reading it. And continuous GPS means that if a driver goes off-route, you see it on the map and can reach them.

DeliveryLinx compares each driver's live GPS trail to the planned road route and automatically flags a diversion the moment they stray beyond your threshold. Dispatch sees the run turn orange on the board with the distance off and a push alert, and the driver gets a banner on their phone with a one-tap re-route. When they rejoin the route it clears itself, and every off-route and back-on event is recorded with time, location, and distance in the trip's route log, so a wrong turn is caught while it is happening, not reconstructed after the fact.

The SOS captures their current GPS coordinates, posts an urgent alert into the trip thread, and flags the load on the dispatch board's comms monitor so it cannot be missed, with 911 one tap away on the driver's device. Dispatch can see exactly where the driver is on the map and acknowledge the alert once it is handled, which clears the flag and timestamps who responded. It turns a panicked phone call into a located, logged, actionable event.

Drivers capture GPS, a photo, and a signature from any phone, and DeliveryLinx produces branded Proof of Delivery and Proof of Pickup documents formatted per customer. A signature audit then scans for the PODs that cause chargebacks: missing signatures, obviously fake or scribbled ones, malformed captures, and duplicates reused across stops. Those get flagged before the stop lands on a customer invoice or a vendor bill, so you are not paying for a delivery you cannot prove or eating a chargeback you could have caught.

Yes. Set a must-arrive-by cutoff per customer (for example a pharmacy at 3 PM in one territory and 5 PM in others), and DeliveryLinx fires two reminders for any of that customer's deliveries still out: one an hour before the deadline and one thirty minutes before. The board reconciles against your live delivery data, so a cutoff clears itself the moment its stops show delivered (you can also mark it arrived by hand), and it only lists the customers that genuinely still need attention, matching the Missing POD exception report one for one. Reminders go out by text, email, and in the app the moment anyone on your team logs in, and each cutoff is evaluated in its own territory's local time.

Subcontractor pay computes straight from the same stop data and the same rate engine that bills your customer, using each vendor's negotiated overrides where they exist and the market default everywhere else. You generate a settlement statement per subcontractor per period, the driver can see it in their portal, you mark it paid, and it pushes to NetSuite as a vendor bill. Because cost and revenue come off one engine, your margin is real-time, not reconstructed at month-end.

It moves subcontractor onboarding and recurring compliance out of email-and-PDF chaos into a tracked, audit-ready system. Subcontractors upload W-9s, insurance (auto, general liability, cargo, workers comp), licenses, and signed agreements through a self-service portal, plus per-driver documents (license, MVR, background check, drug test, DOT medical) and per-vehicle documents (registration, inspection). DeliveryLinx reads expiration dates and sends renewal reminders at 60, 30, 14, 7, and 1 days out. If a required document lapses, it can automatically place a payment hold that stops that vendor's bill from posting until the document is replaced, so you are never paying a subcontractor who is out of compliance.

Yes, and it is enforced server-side, not just hidden in the UI. A held vendor's bill is still generated and stored, but its NetSuite status stays 'held' until an admin releases it with a reason. Every placement and release is logged. That is the difference between a reminder you can ignore and a control that actually protects you.

There is a core subscription that covers billing automation, route profitability, carrier settlement, and vendor compliance, with unlimited uploads and unlimited users on every tier (we do not nickel-and-dime per seat). On top of that are two optional add-on modules you only pay for if you use them: Plan & Scan and Freight. Each add-on is $349 per month, with lower quarterly and annual rates, and add-ons can be bought standalone or bolted onto any tier. Territories beyond Scale and high-volume pricing are available on request.

Freight is the dispatch TMS module: the live dispatch board with the war-room map and continuous GPS, the financial load board, multi-stop lanes, carrier and driver management, settlements, rate confirmations and BOLs, and the full driver-comms and safety platform (unified thread, SMS, voice notes with transcription, SOS, text-to-speech read-back). It is $349 per month on top of the core subscription, for operators who dispatch freight or want a live board for their final-mile routes.

Plan & Scan adds the field-operations layer: route planning and sequencing with realistic drive-time estimates, package scanning from any phone, BOL/POD capture and audit, mileage tracking, fuel-cost modeling, and the route performance engine that learns each market's true minutes-per-stop. It is $349 per month and pairs with the core billing platform for operators who want to run the street, not just bill it.

Yes. You can start free and run a real billing cycle before you pay a cent, including driving the whole flow from your phone. Plans are month-to-month, add-ons can be turned on and off, and there is no long-term contract holding you hostage.

Yes, at the database level. Every account is separated by row-level security, so the isolation is enforced by the server on every query, not just hidden in the interface. Subcontractors logging into the portal can only ever see their own loads, documents, rates, and pay, with no cross-vendor visibility, ever. Sensitive fields like tax IDs and driver license numbers are stored encrypted, and documents live in a private store reachable only through short-lived signed links.

Yes, and it is a requirement, not a nice-to-have. Drivers scan packages, capture POD, send voice notes, and hit SOS from their phones. Operators can upload the daily file, work the dispatch board, message drivers, and close a billing period from a phone, with touch targets sized for the field and tables that degrade to cards on a small screen. The deployed web app is the canonical interface; there is no 'you have to be at the desk for that.'