A load goes on the board. A truck goes under it. The row tells you if it fits.

A load is one line on the board. You type it in once, from the rate confirmation or the customer's email, and it appears in the unassigned lane across the top of the week. Nothing is placed yet. The board holds what your office knows about the load and asks for nothing it does not need.

Every field is optional except the two stops. A dispatcher in a hurry can enter a pickup, a delivery and a day, and fill the rest in when the driver is assigned. A load with no appointment window shows a plain chip; a load with a window shows the window on the chip, because that is the thing a dispatcher reads first.

Miles are entered by your office, not looked up. That is deliberate. Your drivers run the roads they run, and a dispatcher who has sent trucks to the same dock for years knows the real number better than a map does.

Trucks run down the left side of the board, one line per unit, with the driver currently on that tractor. To assign a load you drag its chip from the unassigned lane onto a unit's line. The chip lands on the pickup day and stretches to the delivery day. That is the whole gesture.

Before the chip settles, the board reads that unit's line for the days the load covers. It looks at the driver's home days, at any other chip already on those days, at the hours your office has entered for him, and at the window on the load. If all of it fits, the chip goes amber and the run sheet for that driver is marked as changed. If something does not fit, the chip goes red and stays red until a person resolves it.

A tractor with no driver on it shows as open. You can still place a load on an open unit — some carriers plan the truck first and the driver on Sunday night — but the row carries a marker until a driver is named, and no run sheet is produced for a truck without a driver.

Power only loads are placed the same way. The chip is marked power only so the driver knows the trailer is the customer's and the run sheet shows where to pick it up.

Red means a person has to decide something. The board never resolves a red row on its own, because the right answer depends on things a dispatcher knows and software does not: which driver will take a late load without complaint, which customer will accept a next-day delivery, which home day is a promise and which one is a preference.

A row goes red in four cases:

• Home time. A load's days overlap a day the driver is marked home. The chip is red on the overlapping day.
• Two loads, one unit. A second chip is placed on a day the unit already has one, and their stops cannot be run in sequence within the day.
• A window the miles cannot make. The delivery window on this load falls before the previous load's delivery plus the miles entered between them.
• Hours. The driving or on-duty hours your office entered for that driver do not cover the days the chip spans. This reads what your office typed, nothing more.

Hover or tap a red chip and the reason is written out in a sentence. Fix the cause — move a load, change a home day, name a different driver — and the chip returns to amber. The record keeps a line saying what was red, when, and what the dispatcher did about it.

Plans change by Tuesday lunch. A shipper pushes a pickup a day, a truck goes into the shop, a driver's family needs him home. Moving a load is the same gesture as placing it: drag the chip to another unit or another day, and the board reads the new row before it settles.

The part that matters is what the board holds onto while you move things. Home days are pinned to the driver, not to the unit. If you slide Driver B to a different tractor on Wednesday, his Thursday home day slides with him and the new unit's line shows it. If you move his load to a different driver, the load loses nothing — stops, window, notes and trailer all travel with the chip — and the home day stays where it was promised.

Every move produces two things: a reissued run sheet for each driver affected, marked as changed with the change written at the top, and a line in the record saying who moved what, from where to where, and when. If a driver calls to ask why his Thursday changed, the answer is on the screen.