An Australian transport management system that doesn't need a consultant to run it

Why "TMS" means something different here

Search "transport management system" and the top results are largely enterprise platforms built for American 3PLs or European multi-modal logistics. They're impressive bits of software, but if you're running a suburban transport business out of Melbourne's west or a regional linehaul operation out of Toowoomba, most of what they do is noise. You don't need ocean freight modules. You need to know where your rigs are, who's got what load, whether the customer got their delivery, and whether the invoice went out.

RootaRig was built for that shape of business. A proper TMS in the sense that it covers the transport workflow end to end, but scoped to Australian road freight and priced accordingly. If you're a small-to-mid operator, this is what a TMS should actually look like.

Multi-drop jobs, done properly

The single biggest gap in most cheaper Australian trucking software is multi-drop. Either they don't handle it at all, or they treat every additional stop as a separate job which throws your reporting out and drives your drivers spare.

RootaRig treats a job as a sequence of stops. You can add any number of pickups and drops, drag them into the exact order the driver will do them, and every stop stays attached to the parent job with its own contact, address, arrival window and status. When a driver finishes a stop, the next one lights up on their phone. When the job pushes across to MyTrucking, the sequence goes with it — Address 1, Address 2, Suburb, State, Post Code, all split cleanly, in the right fields, in the right order.

Address validation baked in

Half the headaches with an interstate TMS come from address data. Free-text addresses that don't parse, missing post codes, suburbs that don't exist, drivers turning up two streets over because the field was pasted in from an email. We spent a fair chunk of time on this: every address entered in RootaRig — whether typed by the customer on the booking form or pasted in by an allocator — gets validated and auto-split into proper Australian address components before it saves. Bad addresses get flagged. Good addresses go straight through to the driver's nav.

Real-time dispatch, no polling

The dispatch board is realtime end to end. When the allocator moves a job onto a rig, the driver's app updates in under a second. When the driver marks arrived, the customer's tracking link ticks over before they can hit refresh. When a POD lands, the office knows. Nothing waits five minutes for a poll cycle and nothing needs manually syncing.

The board itself is designed to stay useful at scale. A fleet of forty rigs stays as readable as a fleet of four because you've got filters for driver, status, depot, customer and date, saved views you can share with the office, and a CSV export that includes every stop in the correct sequence for whichever selection you're looking at.

What sits alongside the TMS

The TMS is the core, but the platform stretches a bit further. Read up on our fleet management software if you also need compliance dates and vehicle registers, or check out the trucking management software overview for the full driver and customer story. It all runs on the same data, so nothing gets copied between products.

Hosted in Australia, priced in AUD

Data lives in an Australian region. Invoices come in Australian dollars with GST handled through Paddle as merchant of record, so your bookkeeper gets a proper tax invoice and doesn't have to fudge exchange rates every month. Support runs in Australian business hours and, unlike a couple of the big American platforms, we answer the phone.

Who this suits

Honestly, if you run more than three rigs and you're still using a whiteboard, a spreadsheet or a group chat to allocate work, you'll get value out of it inside a week. Common operator profiles we see doing well on RootaRig:

• Owner-operator with a small pool of subbies — mixing internal and subbie loads on one board.
• Regional linehaul running four to twenty rigs — needs live location, POD capture and customer alerts.
• Multi-drop metro courier or crane operator — dozens of stops a day, address validation is critical.
• Yard scaling out of a legacy system that charges per rig and per user and doesn't handle offline PODs.

If any of those sound like you, it's worth an hour of your time to have a proper look.

Common questions

Is RootaRig a full TMS?

For the workflow most Australian road freight operators need, yes. Bookings and quoting, allocation and dispatch, driver workflow, POD capture, customer visibility and reporting all live in the one system. What we don't do (yet) is full financial accounting or freight rating for large 3PLs — plenty of operators plug those in separately.

Does it integrate with MyTrucking?

Yes. Jobs push across with the full stop sequence, normalised addresses and contact details for each stop. You can run RootaRig as the operational front end and keep MyTrucking as the invoicing back end if that suits your setup.

What about offline?

The driver app is offline-first. Photos, signatures, notes and status changes queue locally and sync the moment signal comes back. A driver can do a whole day between reception dead zones and nothing gets lost.

Can customers book jobs themselves?

Yes. Send them a link to your branded portal and they can lodge quotes and bookings with multi-stop pickups and drops, all in your colours and logo, no login wall.

Get on with it

The best way to see whether a TMS actually fits your yard is to run a real job through it. Have a look at the plans and pricing, then start the free trial and get an allocator on the dispatch board this afternoon. If it's not for you, no drama. If it is, welcome aboard.