Hi, I work as a bookkeeper for a small trucking company. Normally we pay actual odometer miles to our CPM drivers but sometimes drivers lose their miles sheets or don’t turn them in on time for payroll and I have to use an estimate to make sure they still get paid on time. These miles sheets are internal forms for payroll only, not their DOT logbooks. I don’t have timely access to their logbooks so I can’t use those for payroll.
I’ve been using Google Maps to estimate mileage between their stops but when miles sheets are just late (not permanently lost) and I get the actual miles sheets later to calculate correct pay so I can make up the difference on the next check, I find that the Google Maps estimates are almost always under actual miles by a material amount of miles/money that I personally wouldn’t want to lose from my own paychecks if it were me with the lost miles sheet.
Meanwhile, I’ve done enough reading here and on other trucking forums to now realize that Google Maps is not good for planning routes for tractor trailers and the real routes that our drivers take will often need to be longer than the Google Maps estimates for good reason, e.g., low bridges, tight turns, etc.
What is a good free website for calculating tractor-trailer routes/miles between a list of stops, that will produce a more accurate miles estimate?
I see TruckerPath get mentioned a lot but that seems to just be a phone app and I need something I can print out from my work desktop computer to add to the backup in place of the miles sheets.
TruckRouter.com looks good to me but I can’t find many reviews of it, and as someone who has never driven a truck, I have no idea if it produces reasonable routes?
Also, all these route calculators seem to assume a robot that drives 24/7 and never goes off-route for fuel, toilets, food, sleep, etc. So I’m thinking I should add a certain number of miles per day to my estimates for those needs, what’s reasonable?
Thanks in advance for your help.
