The trucking back office that bills itself.

The carrier-side bottleneck isn't the road — it's the paperwork

A 20-truck carrier covers loads fine. The dispatcher knows the lanes. The drivers know the customers. The problem is everything that happens around the load. The rate con shows up as a PDF in a Gmail inbox at 9pm and someone retypes it into a spreadsheet. The driver arrives at the shipper and three brokers call in two hours wanting ETAs. The POD comes back two days later and a clerk emails the invoice to factoring, then chases the advance for a week. The fuel card statement and the direct shipper remittance never quite match the QuickBooks line.

Keelway compresses that whole back-office stack into one database. Email parses to load. Plaid lines reconcile to settlements. The carrier portal answers the broker's ETA question without a human. Factoring sees the POD the moment the driver snaps it. The dispatcher stops being an accountant and goes back to running trucks.

The four jobs Keelway handles for a carrier

The carrier portal — what brokers see about you

The carrier portal is the trust surface between your fleet and the brokers you haul for. It is what shows up the third time a broker coordinator dials your dispatcher and finally clicks the link in the rate-con email instead. What lives there:

• Live fleet snapshot. Active trucks, current position (from your ELD), driver assigned, HOS remaining, current ETA versus the appointment window.
• Capacity surface. Trucks empty in the next 24 hours, current home-base, lanes you regularly run. Brokers stop asking "what do you have empty in Dallas tomorrow" because the answer is on the screen.
• Lane history. The lanes you actually move, with recent rate ranges and on-time performance. Counter-offers go from vibes to data.
• Claims and OS&D history. Past damage and shortage events, resolution, current status. The honest version, exposed before the broker has to ask.
• Compliance packet. MC authority, COI, drug-test consortium, W-9 — current versions, syndicated to Highway, MyCarrierPortal, RMIS, Carrier411, DAT OnBoard, and Descartes MyCarrier so the broker's compliance vendor sees the same packet.
• POD & invoice status. Delivery proof at the moment of upload, invoice routed to broker AP, factoring advance posted. Three steps the broker can verify themselves instead of emailing your billing clerk.

Getting paid — POD to ACH credit, straight through

The carrier-side payment story is the one that moves the P&L the fastest. An illustrative example, drawn from the synthetic freight set on the marketing site:

• 09:14 — Driver delivers in Englewood CO. Snaps the signed BOL in the driver web app. Load: MC 225392 Ironbridge Carriers · Calhoun GA → Englewood CO · 53ft Van · $3,700. (Illustrative example.)
• 09:14 — Keelway generates the invoice in the broker's required format. Reference numbers, accessorials, and lumper receipt attached.
• 09:15 — Invoice routed to the broker's AP inbox. POD and BOL pushed to factoring as a structured advance request.
• 10:42 — Plaid sees an ACH credit hit the operating account. Keelway matches it to the load, the invoice, and the advance/reserve split. The settlement line in QuickBooks is already reconciled.

Carriers measure this in days-to-pay against the industry baseline. Carriers on the platform routinely trim multi-day chunks off that number by removing the manual email-and-chase loop entirely.

ELD, factoring, fuel-card — works with what you already pay for

Keelway does not try to replace the systems your fleet already runs on. We read from them. We write back to them. The integration set covers the categories small and mid-size carriers actually use:

• ELD & telematics: Motive (KeepTruckin), Samsara, Geotab, Omnitracs, Verizon Connect, EROAD, Surfsight, Azuga, Zonar, FleetComplete, plus the smaller ELD-Rider-class providers most owner-ops run. Position, HOS, and event data flow into the load record and the carrier portal automatically.
• Factoring & back-office: the major trucking-specialized factoring categories — recourse, non-recourse, and fuel-advance products — plus generic ACH remittance via Plaid for self-financed carriers. POD upload triggers a structured advance request without your billing clerk.
• Fuel cards & bank feeds: Plaid covers the operating account and the fuel-card statement feeds. Draws and credits reconcile against loads automatically.
• Identity & compliance: FMCSA QCMobile, Highway, MyCarrierPortal, RMIS, Carrier411, DAT OnBoard, Descartes MyCarrier. One packet, current everywhere.
• Existing TMS, if you have one: McLeod LoadMaster, TMW Suite, Prophesy, Profit Tools, Aljex, Tai TMS, Rose Rocket, Axon Software. Keelway sits next to the dispatch TMS for carriers that already own one — we handle the broker-facing surface and the AP ledger.

Who carrier-side Keelway is built for

Keelway is built for 1–100 power-unit fleets. The product self-scales across that range:

• Owner-operators & 1–5 trucks: Keelway is usually your first piece of dedicated software. Replaces the shared Gmail, the load spreadsheet, and the AP folder on someone's laptop. Every feature unlocked at the entry tier.
• 10–25 trucks: Replaces the patchwork of dispatch spreadsheet, factoring portal, fuel-card app, and three broker tracking portals. One dispatcher runs what used to take two.
• 25–100 trucks: Either replaces an aging dispatch TMS outright, or runs next to it on the back-office and broker-facing surfaces. The broker-out tab becomes a real margin-add when overflow is a regular pattern.
• Carrier-broker hybrids: Same login, same data model, dual permission scopes. Your asset fleet and your brokerage book stay cleanly separated but share a carrier-identity layer. This is the single shape Keelway is most differentiated for.

Implementation — what the first 30 days look like

1. Day 1 — Connect the inbox. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 OAuth into the dispatcher inbox. Keelway starts parsing inbound rate confirmations on arrival. First load record auto-populates within the hour.
2. Day 2 — Connect the bank. Plaid link to the operating account. Incoming ACH credits start matching against loads. Fuel-card and remittance feeds reconcile in the background.
3. Day 3 — ELD passthrough. Motive, Samsara, Geotab, Omnitracs, or your provider connects through the integration picker. Position, HOS, and event data start populating the load record and the carrier portal.
4. Day 5 — Factoring linked. POD-to-advance routing goes live. The first invoice generates in the broker's required format and hits the broker AP inbox plus your factoring provider in parallel.
5. Day 10 — Carrier portal shared with brokers. Send your top broker partners the portal link. They start self-serving location and ETA. The inbound check-call queue quietly halves.
6. Day 14 — Broker-out tab live. Over-capacity loads can post to the carrier-facing inbox surface. Margin starts landing in the AP ledger for loads you would have turned away.
7. Day 30 — Back office reconciled. Month-end close is a review-and-approve job instead of a reconciliation job. Dispatcher time has shifted from chasing paperwork to covering loads and running trucks.

How carrier-side Keelway compares to the alternatives

• Legacy carrier TMS (McLeod LoadMaster, TMW Suite, Prophesy, Profit Tools): deep dispatch and driver-pay tooling, but the back-office and broker-facing surfaces are decades old. Most carriers running these still retype rate cons and chase factoring by email. Keelway either replaces them at the small-fleet end or runs alongside them at the 50–100 truck end.
• Owner-op "dispatch spreadsheet" + QuickBooks: the default stack for 1–5 truck fleets. Free up front, expensive in clerk hours. Keelway is built specifically to replace this combination without forcing an enterprise-software cost shape on a tiny fleet.
• Standalone driver apps (DriverApp, KeepTruckin, etc.): solve the driver-side surface only. Don't parse rate cons, don't reconcile AP, don't broker out overflow. Keelway ingests these as data feeds instead of replacing them.
• Factoring-company portals (RTS, Apex, Triumph, OTR): great for the advance lifecycle. Don't handle dispatch, don't handle the carrier portal, don't broker out. Keelway pushes structured advance requests into these instead of replacing them.
• Generic accounting (QuickBooks, Xero): still useful as the GL system of record. Keelway sits in front and feeds clean, already-matched lines into it. You stop running QuickBooks as a load tracker.

Pricing posture

Same usage-based model as the broker side — no per-seat fee, no per-driver charge, no factoring lock-in. A 5-truck owner-op lands in the entry tier with every feature unlocked: fleet management, AP automation, carrier portal, broker-out. First 50 loads are free, no card required. Full breakdown on the pricing page, and the live BMS prototype walks through the same product carriers actually log into.

Security, compliance, and data ownership

Keelway is SOC 2 Type II bound, TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest. We do not share your lane history or rate data with the brokers you haul for. We do not sell aggregated rate intelligence to third parties. If you leave Keelway, every load, settlement, driver record, and document exports in one click — CSV, JSON, or PDF. Full posture lives on the privacy page.