Driver & Owner-Operator Settlement Builder: From Completed Loads to a Pay-Ready Statement

The problem this kills

Every pay period the settlements clerk faces the same grind. Pull the completed loads out of the TMS. Figure out how each driver is paid — this one's per mile, that one's a percentage of the linehaul, the company driver is flat per stop. Add fuel surcharge. Subtract the deductions: insurance, the trailer lease, the ELD, last week's fuel advance, the escrow contribution. Recover the cash advance from Tuesday. Catch the chargeback for the damaged freight. Then build a statement for each driver, total it, and re-key the net pay into payroll or AP — and pray you didn't pay a load twice or miss an advance you were supposed to recover.

It's slow, it's repetitive, and it's exactly the kind of math where one slip means an overpaid driver, an angry owner-operator, an escrow account that never balances, or an advance that quietly never gets recovered. You do not need to be a developer to put guardrails around it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your settlement run. You import the pay period's completed loads. The tool drafts a settlement for each driver: it applies their pay rule (per mile, percentage of revenue, or flat), adds accessorials and fuel surcharge, then subtracts recurring deductions, recovers any outstanding advances, books the escrow contribution, and applies chargebacks. You see each driver's gross, deductions, recovered advances, and net pay laid out line by line. The settlements clerk reviews and fixes anything off, a manager approves the run — and only then does the tool generate a clean settlement PDF for each driver and a payroll/AP export in the columns your system expects. The same load can never be paid twice.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your TMS, the exact columns in your completed-loads export, how each driver type is actually paid, your recurring deductions, how escrow and advances work, and your real approval rules — so the tool is tailored to how you settle drivers, not a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the import, the per-driver draft, the review screen, the manager approval gate, and the PDF + payroll export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a "No API yet?" path: import a CSV from your TMS and export a clean payroll/AP file plus per-driver statements, so you can build and use the whole thing today.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real money paid to real drivers, so the plan builds in the controls a fleet finance team needs: login so only your settlements and dispatch team can use it; row-level security so you only ever see your own company's loads and drivers; a complete audit trail of who imported, edited, approved, and exported what, and when; a hard human-approval gate where a manager signs off on every settlement run before any pay is committed or a payroll file exists; and duplicate guards keyed on load + driver + pay period so the same load can never be settled twice or an advance recovered twice.

Who it's for

Settlements clerks, payroll specialists, and dispatch managers at carriers and brokerages who run driver and owner-operator pay every week or two and are tired of doing it in a spreadsheet with their fingers crossed. If you can describe how each of your drivers gets paid, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer a few questions about how you settle drivers. Your first drafted statement is minutes away.