These warnings come from real customers. Names are anonymized.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.tread.ai/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
Hierarchy
Always create entities at the parent level, then share down.
A multi-region producer set up drivers, vendors, equipment, and customers at the child-company level. Dispatchers couldn’t assign drivers across divisions, mobile users couldn’t see internal drivers, and payroll couldn’t pull a clean hours report.
The fix took two days of back-end migration to lift everything to the parent and re-share. See Companies & Hierarchy.
Flat is the default. Use parent/child only for true regional splits.
A complex multi-entity hauler ran three legal entities with terminals as child companies. The hierarchy was justified, but the cutover slipped from December to February while data cascading and per-customer billing rules got cleaned up.
If your dispatchers and AP team operate as one group, stay flat — the training and data overhead of parent/child is real.
Master data
Set up Equipment Types before Equipment.
Capacity, unit of measure, and the prevailing-wage capability all live on the Equipment Type. If you skip the type and create equipment first, material tracking breaks and you can’t load-balance trucks by capacity.
Build types first, then add trucks against them. See Equipment Types.
Geofence type changes affect historical data.
Switching a site’s geofence from a circle to a polygon retroactively changes which past loads counted as “on site.” This shows up as load-count discrepancies in old reports.
Pick the geofence shape during onboarding and leave it alone. See Sites & Geofences.
Mark prevailing-wage materials independently — project PW does not auto-inherit.
A public-works contractor flagged the project as prevailing wage and assumed materials inherited. They didn’t. Materials shipped on regular rates and the contractor had to redo three weeks of settlements.
Flag PW on the project, on each truck, and on each material that qualifies. See Materials.
Billing
Approve before you settle.
Tickets that don’t show up on a settlement are almost always tickets that haven’t been approved. Approvals run in three tiers: shift, job, and load. All three must complete before a load is settle-eligible.
Check the Approvals queue first. See Timesheet Approvals.
Commission applies to the line item, not the invoice total.
A trucking customer set a 20% commission expecting it to apply to the invoice total. Tread applied it to each line item. The numbers matched on small jobs but diverged on multi-line settlements.
Test commission on the settlement side, not the invoice side, before go-live. See Settlements & Driver Pay.
Void-and-redo is the only correction path.
You cannot edit an approved settlement in place. To fix a mistake, void the settlement, unapprove the affected lines, change the data, re-approve, and create a new settlement.
Voided settlements stay in the system under the Void filter for audit.
One job, one invoice. Plan accordingly.
Tread does not split a single job across multiple invoices. If a customer needs separate invoices for separate scopes, build separate jobs.
Decide the invoice cut points when you set up the project, not at billing time.
Fuel surcharge has three pieces — set up all three.
A fuel surcharge needs a Fuel Price Index (the weekly diesel reference), a Surcharge Schedule (the price-to-surcharge table), and an Add-On that applies it to an order. Setting up only the Add-On gives you a flat fee, not a real surcharge.
Update the index weekly. See Manage Rates, Add-Ons, Fees.
Drivers & vendors
Drivers must never see customer billing rates.
A national hauler ran a beta where a driver accidentally saw a customer rate. The feature was pulled the same day. Driver-facing rates show driver pay only; customer rates and markups are role-restricted.
Test visibility settings against a real driver login before you roll out. See Roles & Permissions.
Deactivate drivers — don’t delete them.
Deleting a driver locks the phone number and blocks reuse. This is the single most common support request.
Deactivate the user instead. History stays intact and the phone number frees up. See Adding Drivers.
Vendor adoption takes four weeks. Stay firm.
A regional aggregate hauler pushed subhaulers onto Tread and saw heavy resistance for the first month — drivers skipping ticket photos, vendors calling the dispatcher to complain. The customer held the line: app-only tickets, no paper backup. After four weeks, adoption stuck.
Customers who follow this pattern see zero churn. Customers who blink end up with a hybrid system that costs more than either approach. See Driver App.
O&Os get dispatched directly. Vendors do not — unless Direct Dispatch is on.
Owner-operators (drivers who own their truck) accept jobs like internal drivers. Vendors receive a job and assign their own driver — unless the vendor turns on Direct Dispatch. Confusing the two leads to jobs that sit unassigned.
Mark the relationship correctly when you create the vendor. See Vendors.
AI ticket review is informational, not a gate.
The Ticket Chaser flags duplicate ticket numbers, quantity outliers, and date mismatches. These are hints, not blocks. A bulk-aggregate customer ignored several flags as false positives during go-live and approved the loads.
Train approvers to read flags and use judgment. Don’t wait for a clean queue. See AI Data Collection & Approvals.
Internal drivers should see their own pay rate.
Only customer-side rates are role-gated. Internal drivers need to see what they’re earning per load or per hour for their own tracking — restricting it makes them call the office for every paycheck.
Leave driver-pay visibility on for internal drivers. Lock down customer billing rates separately. See Roles & Permissions.
Master data
Vendor name or EIN changes need a new vendor record.
Editing a vendor’s legal name or EIN on the existing record breaks 1099 history. The vendor’s prior pay statements end up under the new name and the prior EIN disappears.
Create a new vendor record for the new entity, deactivate the old one, and migrate active jobs. See Vendors.
Order timezones use the project’s site timezone, not the dispatcher’s.
A dispatcher in Chicago dispatching a Phoenix project sees order times in Phoenix time. This catches teams off guard when one office runs work across regions.
Confirm the project’s site timezone before reading start and end times. See Sites & Geofences.
Billing
Don’t attach pricing-sheet PDFs to projects.
Project attachments are visible to drivers assigned to the project — including driver-app users on the jobsite. A customer rate sheet attached as “for reference” is a leak waiting to happen.
Keep pricing in the rate card record, not in project attachments. See Rates & Add-Ons.
Rate precedence: site rate schedule wins, then project, then customer.
When a rate looks like it “disappeared” or “reappeared,” it’s almost always precedence. A site-level schedule overrides a project rate, and a project rate overrides a customer rate. First match wins.
Trace from the most specific scope down. See Rates & Add-Ons.
Dispatch
Bulk-editing load counts can reset to 1 if save races order resync.
Editing load counts in bulk while another user resyncs the order can land a stale value back on the order — sometimes resetting counts to 1.
Refresh between batch edits and confirm counts before dispatching. See Create Project → Order → Dispatch.
Adding a driver mid-day to an active digital-ticket order may force scale-ticket mode.
On an active digital-ticket job, adding a fresh driver after the first ticket has been captured can flip the new driver’s session into scale-ticket mode. The driver ends up taking photos of nothing.
Restart the job for the new driver instead of re-adding them mid-shift. See Digital Tickets.
Live map shows non-dispatched trucks if telematics is streaming them.
A truck on a telematics feed appears on the live map even when it isn’t dispatched to anything in Tread. The map is a vehicle view, not an active-dispatch view.
Filter by status if you want only active dispatches. See Track Drivers & Collect Tickets.