What is fleet management software?
Fleet management software, for a logistics business, is what a courier, cargo or transport company runs its whole day on: taking a booking, pricing it, printing the consignment note and labels, bundling shipments onto a vehicle, sending them out with a driver, recording what was delivered and what came back, and billing the customer at the end of the month. When those steps live in separate registers, spreadsheets and phone calls, nobody can answer the simplest question a customer asks: where is my parcel?
AtashiTech's fleet management software puts the whole loop on one shipment record. It is built around shipments and the vehicles and drivers that carry them, not live GPS telematics. It runs as a web admin portal for the booking desk, branches and accounts, a customer portal where each customer books, tracks and downloads invoices, a public website with shipment tracking by consignment number, a staff Android app for the field, and a REST API for the systems around it. It is running in production for a courier and logistics operator, handling multiple companies and branches from one installation.
Three problems the system is built to remove
Logistics software earns its place when the cost of re-keying, mispricing and lost paperwork becomes larger than the cost of a system. These are the situations it is aimed at.
Courier and cargo companies with many branches
Each branch books, manifests and delivers, and head office needs one picture. Bookings, manifests and runsheets share one record, so a consignment booked in one city can be followed through every hub and branch until it is delivered.
Operators who lose money on pricing
Freight worked out by hand from a rate card on the wall is slow and often wrong. The system prices every booking from the customer's own rate card, adds fuel and other charges, applies the right tax and shows the breakdown before the booking is saved.
Operators who lose disputes for lack of evidence
Short delivery, wrong address, nobody at the door: without a delivery status, a reason and a signed proof of delivery, the operator pays. Every drop carries its status, its reason when undelivered and a scanned POD attached to the consignment.
How the fleet management software runs a working day
A shipment passes through four stages. Each stage feeds the next, and every event is written to the consignment's history, which is what the customer sees when they track it.
Book and print
The booking desk keys the consignment, or converts a booking request the customer sent from the portal. Freight is priced from the rate card, the expected delivery date is worked out from the route's transit days, and the consignment note and barcode labels are printed, one label per piece.
Manifest and move
Consignments leaving a branch or hub are scanned onto a manifest with the vehicle number and driver. The receiving end sees what is on its way, and every scanned consignment shows it as in transit.
Deliver
At the destination, consignments waiting for delivery are picked onto a delivery runsheet for a driver. When the driver returns, each one is marked delivered or undelivered with a reason, and cash collected on to-pay shipments is recorded against it.
Prove and bill
The signed proof of delivery is scanned and uploaded, one at a time or in bulk by file name. At the end of the period customer bills are raised from the delivered bookings, and the customer downloads them from their portal.
What the system covers
The modules below are built and in daily use. They share one consignment record, one customer record and one branch structure, which is what lets a complaint, a missing POD and a billing query be answered from the same screen.
Consignment booking
Forward and reverse bookings, credit, to-pay and cash payment types, consignor and consignee details, invoices with e-way bill numbers where required, item dimensions with volumetric weight, and a hand-off to another carrier with its own tracking number.
Rate cards and tax
Customer-wise freight by lane, mode and service type, fuel surcharge, docket, COD and handling charges, and GST split between CGST and SGST or IGST, calculated live on the booking screen.
Labels and scanning
Barcode and QR labels per piece on a thermal label printer, a printed consignment note, and barcode scanning to find a booking or attach it to a manifest.
Zones, hubs and routes
Zones, hubs, hub-to-city mapping, routes with transit days per service type, route and zone rates, and pincode serviceability that decides whether a delivery address can be accepted.
Manifests and runsheets
Hub-to-hub or branch-to-branch manifests with vehicle and driver, delivery runsheets per driver, and status updates by runsheet or by single consignment.
Proof of delivery
Front and back POD images per consignment or per runsheet, a pending-POD list, and bulk upload where each scanned file is matched to its consignment by name.
Customer portal
Each customer signs in to book, track shipments, see delivery status and PODs, download invoices, raise support tickets and send booking requests that the desk converts in one step.
Tickets and follow-ups
Customer complaints and queries as tickets with a thread, internal notes the customer never sees, follow-up dates and a ticket history, with alerts to staff.
Platform, integrations and deployment
The system runs as a web admin portal with a customer portal beside it, a public website with consignment tracking and a contact form, a staff Android app, and a REST API. Everything sits on one database with companies, branches and users kept apart: a user sees only the companies and branches they are given, and an access manager decides which menus each role may open.
The staff app opens the booking, runsheet, POD, tracking and ticket screens a user is allowed to see, scans barcodes with the phone camera and receives push alerts for new tickets and booking requests. Booking history from a previous system can be imported and kept read-only beside new work, so reports cover both. Live GPS tracking and vehicle telematics are not part of the standard system; where an operator needs them, they are scoped as a customised addition. Hosting, environments and monitoring are set up by our cloud, DevOps and integration team as part of the engagement.
Reports the desk and the accounts team use
Every report reads the same consignment record, so the numbers on the dashboard, the bill and the branch report agree.
Dashboards
Bookings, deliveries, pending PODs, open tickets and billed revenue for the company or a branch, with a switch between the current financial year and all data.
Booking and business summary
Booking reports with print and label actions per row, and a business summary of bookings and revenue for any period.
Daily cash report
Cash and to-pay collections per branch and day, with expenses recorded against a photo of the bill.
Manifest and runsheet reports
Bagging, arrival and runsheet reports with printable sheets, so the paper that travels with the vehicle comes from the system.
Customer billing
Bills raised from delivered bookings with an annexure of consignments, a billed report and invoice printing, also available to the customer in their portal.
Exports
Lists and reports exported to Excel for accounts, audits and customers who want their own copy.
Where fleet management software fits
Road logistics spans everything from a single-city courier to a multi-state cargo network. These are the settings where the system is a fit, and where another AtashiTech solution sits naturally beside it.
Courier and express parcel
Consignment notes, labels, hub manifests and runsheets for a network of branches, with public tracking on the company's own website.
Part-load and cargo transport
Weight and volume-based pricing per customer, e-way bills on the invoices, and branch-to-branch manifests for the line-haul vehicles.
Reverse logistics
Reverse bookings and reverse booking requests from the customer portal for returns and pickups, tracked on the same record.
E-commerce deliveries
Brands that sell online link their store to bookings through the API; our e-commerce platform can be connected in the same engagement, so an order becomes a booking without re-keying.
Manufacturers and distributors
Companies running their own dispatch can connect bookings to their ERP, and induct visiting drivers at the yard gate with contractor induction software.
Depots and loading bays
Where trucks queue for bays, queue management software gives each driver a numbered slot and the yard a live display board.
Implementation, customisation and support
An engagement begins with the operator's own data: companies, branches, hubs, cities and pincodes served, customers and their rate cards, and a sample of a normal day's bookings. We load the masters, set up roles and menus for each kind of user, configure the printers and scanners at the booking desks, and run a period in which the system shadows the existing process before the desk switches over. Where an older system holds years of bookings, the history is imported and kept read-only so that reports and tracking still find it.
Because AtashiTech builds the system, changes are in scope. A customer-specific tariff, a consignment note in your own layout, a report in the format your accounts team uses, or an integration with a customer's portal can be built in rather than worked around. Where the customer-facing tracking experience needs its own design, our UI/UX design team handles it, and the staff app is maintained by our Android and iOS app development practice.
After go-live the system runs under an annual maintenance contract with monitoring, updates and support, described on the Software Consulting and AMC Support page. Every engagement is scoped and quoted individually on the number of branches, the integrations and the data to be migrated; we publish no list prices. More on logistics operations and the software behind them appears on the AtashiTech blog.
Talk to us about your logistics operation
Tell us how many branches you run, how you book and price today and what goes wrong on a normal day, and we will walk you through that same day in the system. Reach us through the contact page, or see the rest of our solutions and services.
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