A call comes in on Thursday afternoon. The consignee says eight pallets arrived but the paperwork says ten. Or a few cartons are crushed and the customer wants them credited. Your driver says everything was fine when he left. The customer says it wasn't. Nobody has a photo, the load was loaded by the customer's team, and the only document is a delivery note with an illegible scribble.
This is the point where most transport businesses discover that claims aren't decided by who is right. They are decided by who can show what the load looked like at the start of the trip.
Why the collection point matters most
Once a truck leaves the loading bay, the condition of the goods becomes a matter of opinion. Between collection and delivery there are many places for the story to get muddy: a transfer at a depot, a trailer swap, a driver change, a delay at a border or a customer's gate. If you can't show the goods were intact and correctly counted when you took them over, you are arguing from a weak position, even when your driver did nothing wrong.
The reverse is also true. If a shortage was already there at loading, good records let you push the claim back to the shipper where it belongs.
What to record before the truck leaves
None of this takes long once it becomes routine. The aim is a short, consistent set of facts attached to every load.
- The count, agreed and signed. Pallets, cartons or units as loaded, confirmed by someone on the shipper's side. If the count was not possible, for example sealed containers or shrink-wrapped pallets, the document should say so.
- Visible condition notes. Damaged packaging, wet cartons, leaning pallets or broken wrap should be written on the collection document before departure, not discovered at delivery.
- Photos with a timestamp. The loaded vehicle from the rear, the load arrangement before doors close, any existing damage, and the seal in place. Photos taken on the driver's phone at the time are far more convincing than ones sent days later.
- Seal numbers. Recorded at loading and checked at delivery. A broken or mismatched seal changes the conversation immediately.
- Who loaded and how. Note whether the shipper loaded and secured the goods, or your driver did. This affects who is responsible for load restraint and for certain kinds of damage.
- Time in and time out. If a load was rushed or sat in the sun for hours before collection, the timestamps help explain the condition on arrival.
The driver is your evidence collector
The driver is usually the only person from your business present at collection, so the process depends on what you ask of them. If the instruction is simply “go and load”, you will get a signed slip and nothing else. If the instruction is a short, specific checklist, you get evidence.
Keep that checklist short enough to be done every time. Five or six items are realistic. Fifteen will be skipped when the driver is under pressure to get out of a busy yard. Also make it clear that noting a problem is not the driver being difficult. A driver who writes “3 cartons damaged on collection” has protected the business, and should not be penalised for slowing the shipper down.
Handling the shipper who pushes back
Some shippers resist remarks on the collection document, either because they are busy or because they don't want to admit to a packing problem. A few practical approaches:
- Agree the process in the contract or rate agreement, so a request for condition notes is a standard procedure and not a personal challenge.
- If a remark is refused, the driver should photograph the issue and send it to dispatch straight away, so there is a timestamped record on your side.
- Where goods are clearly unfit to travel, escalate to dispatch before the truck moves. It is far cheaper to hold a load for twenty minutes than to carry a dispute for three weeks.
Keep the evidence with the load, not in someone's phone
Good evidence is useless if it can't be found when the claim arrives, often days or weeks later and often when the driver is on another route or has left the business. Photos sitting in a WhatsApp chat, signed slips in a cab and counts in a dispatcher's notebook all make it slow to respond. A slow, vague response weakens your position even when you have the facts.
The practical fix is to attach everything to the load record itself: collection photos, the signed count, seal numbers, and the proof of delivery, all in one place. A TMS like TitanFleet can hold these against the load so that whoever handles the claim sees the same file, whether that is the dispatcher, the accounts team or the owner.
Check at delivery, too
The comparison between collection and delivery is what makes the evidence useful. At the receiving end, the driver should check the seal against the record, have the consignee count the goods in his presence, and make sure any exceptions are written on the POD before it is signed. Exceptions raised on the day, with a record, are manageable. A claim that appears a week later with no remarks on the POD is much harder to dispute, because as far as the paperwork shows, the goods were accepted in good order.
Review claims for patterns
Once you keep consistent records, claims start to show patterns. The same shipper's pallets keep arriving unstable. One route has repeated damage. One driver or one subcontractor appears more often than others. These patterns support a conversation about packaging standards, load restraint, vehicle suitability or carrier performance, and they let you address causes instead of absorbing credits as a cost of doing business.
Start with the next ten loads
You don't need to rework your whole operation. For the next ten loads, ask drivers to capture the count, condition and seal details at collection, and make sure it all ends up attached to the load. Then see how quickly you can answer the next query. If the answer is “in minutes, with evidence”, the process is working. If it is “let me find the driver and call you back”, you know where the gap is.