How can I help the truck driver understand their paycheck?
Getting paid for driving a truck is very different than getting paid to be in an office or work in a shop. It is even more different when the driver does not run the exact same places every week. Most of the time, many non-drivers have a good idea of precisely what we are being paid for but truck drivers seem to get confused and feel that they are underpaid at times. Why is that and what can we do about it?
One of the big reasons that truck drivers have more questions about their pay is the many different things for which they can be paid. Solo miles at one rate, team miles at another rate, flat rate runs, detention, extra stops, driver assistance with unloading, and safety or inspection bonuses are just some of the ways a driver can get paid, and usually more than one in each week. That makes more things the driver will want to see on their paystub to know they were paid correctly. That is much more than an hourly office or shop person who just has to verify their hours worked on the paystub.
So, how do we fix it?
It’s easy to say but can be more difficult to do. The answer is to show your work on the paystub. See? Easy to say. How do we get there? That’s up to you and how you process payroll. For our clients, we suggest that they send us all the load information, and we can set up a report within the paystub to show the work. This transparency in your payroll process builds trust and therefore retention with the truck drivers.
Is it enough to send settlement reports with the paystubs?
It is not enough. The truck driver wants to see it all on one page and not have two things to cross-reference. That may seem like a small issue to you, but the drivers have many other things to worry about. It is in your trucking company’s best interest to make it easy on the driver to understand their pay.
Let's look at this example:
Notice the three red underlines I added. The driver can see that the total pay matched up in all three spots, and the driver can see how we go to that total. If something is missing, the driver can ask about it instead of having to figure out what is missing in the first place. That saves everyone a lot of time and frustration.
We built our software to be ready to deliver customized paystubs in the detail section to show what the company wants the driver to see, so we have many other ways of displaying the information in addition to this one. Many times we can get that information from the payroll export in your TMS to save you the work of compiling it all.
Reach out to us below if we can answer any of your questions about how to help your driver make sense of their pay.
Written by Mike Ritzema
With over 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship, management, business planning, financial analysis, software engineering, operations, and decision analysis, Mike has the breadth and depth of experience needed to quickly understand entrepreneurs’ businesses and craft the most suitable solutions.
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