Running on spreadsheets, email and a whiteboard.
Free, flexible, familiar, and completely dependent on the person holding it together. Plenty of real carriers run real businesses this way, and it works right up until it doesn't.
Being fair about it.
This approach is not a mistake. It is how almost every carrier starts, it costs nothing, and it bends to whatever you need on a given Tuesday. The question is not whether it works — it is how much re-typing it needs, and what that costs you over a year.
Where the work crosses a line.
The useful comparison is not a feature checklist — it is how many times the same shipment has to be entered. Every row below is a hand-off, and every hand-off is a chance for something to be typed wrong or not typed at all.
| The hand-off | Spreadsheets, email and a whiteboard | Lanexa |
|---|---|---|
| Quote to load | Retyped from an email into a sheet | The accepted quote becomes the load |
| Load to border filing | Retyped into the customs portal | The filing is built from the load |
| Delivery to invoice | Retyped into accounting | The invoice is raised from the load |
| Invoice to books | Retyped, or reconciled monthly | Posts to the ledger on its own |
| Trip to driver pay | Rebuilt from trip sheets | Calculated from the trip |
| Fuel receipts to IFTA | Reconstructed at quarter-end | Assembled through the quarter |
Where this approach genuinely wins.
Where it breaks down.
It breaks on people, not on volume. The system lives in one person's head and in files only they maintain confidently. When they are away, the operation slows; when they leave, some of it goes with them. The second failure is quieter: nothing is recorded well enough to be checked later, so a missed accessorial or an unbilled load is not discovered, because there is nothing to discover it against.
Other ways of working.
Compared as of August 2026. We compare approaches rather than named products, because a named comparison goes stale the week the other vendor ships something — and because our own capability list is published in full, you can check every claim we make about ourselves.