It costs nothing to start
No subscription, no set-up, no decision to justify to anyone.
Running on spreadsheets, email and a whiteboard.
Free, flexible, familiar — and dependent on the person holding it together. Plenty of carriers run real businesses this way. Here is where it works, where it breaks, and what changes when one record carries the load from quote to payment.
This is not a straw man
This setup is not a mistake. It is a natural place to start, it costs nothing, and it bends to whatever you need on a given Tuesday. The honest question is not whether it works. It is how many times the same shipment gets typed, and what the retyping costs you over a year.
Count the hand-offs, not the features
The useful comparison is how many times the same shipment has to be entered. Every row 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 and email | Lanexa |
|---|---|---|
| Quote to load | Retyped from an email into a sheet | Your customer accepts the quote from a link, with no account, and the accepted quote becomes the loadStart and up |
| Load to driver | A phone call, then a text with the details | The assignment goes by SMS with the load summary PDF attached, and replies land on the load's threadStart and up |
| Proof of delivery | A photo in someone's camera roll | A request link the driver or receiver opens on a phone, with no login, files the POD against the loadEvery plan |
| Delivery to invoice | Retyped into an invoice template | Marking the load delivered writes the draft invoice in the same step, with destination-province tax — or records why it did notEvery plan |
| Waiting time to a charge | Remembered, or not | Recorded stop times against the customer's free hours become a suggested detention charge, one click to billStart and up |
| Trip to driver pay | Rebuilt from trip sheets | A settlement run sweeps the driver's delivered loads, trips, dock time and approved fuel receipts into itemised pay linesStart and up |
| Miles and fuel to IFTA | Reconstructed at quarter end | The quarter assembles from miles already recorded and fuel receipts, with gap and variance checks before you fileEvery plan |
Plan labels show where each Lanexa step is available. Compare plans
Where this setup genuinely wins
It bends instantly
A customer wants something unusual? Add a column. No vendor, no waiting.
Everyone already knows how
No training, and no risk of a tool the office quietly refuses to use.
Where it stops working
It breaks on people rather than volume. The system lives in one person's head and in files only they maintain with confidence; when they are away the operation slows, and 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 never discovered, because there is nothing to discover it against.
Questions carriers ask about this
Is a spreadsheet good enough for a small carrier?
For one truck and a handful of customers, often yes.
It starts to cost money when the same load is typed into several places — the quote, the invoice, the driver's pay, the fuel-tax miles — and when paperwork and waiting time are not recorded at the moment they happen.
Can I import my spreadsheets into Lanexa?
Yes, for loads and customers. CSV import is on every plan, with column names mapped automatically.
Write to support@lanexa.io and we will walk the first one with you.
Do my drivers need to learn an app?
No. Drivers work from links and messages in their phone's browser, and by SMS from the Start plan.
There is no app to install.
Other setups
A dispatch system plus an accounting packageTwo good tools with a person reconciling them at month end. The leak is at the seam: charges seen on the road that never reach the invoice.
A general TMS plus a customs specialistReal depth at the border, but the load is typed twice — and when freight changes after filing, the TMS knows and the customs tool does not.
We compare setups rather than named products, and our own capability list is published in full, so every claim we make about Lanexa can be checked.