Transport Brokerage Software: Market Loads, Lorry Hire, Container Rental, TDS and Billing in One Place

If you run a transport brokerage, you don’t own the trucks. You own the relationships, and you make money on the gap between what the customer pays and what the truck owner takes. That sounds simple until you look at a single load from start to finish.

The customer agrees ₹62,000 for Indore to Pune. You fix a market truck at ₹55,000. You pay the owner ₹40,000 advance at loading and promise the balance after POD. The truck waits two days at the unloading point, so there is detention to claim from the customer and pass on to the owner. Three bags arrive torn, so there is a shortage deduction. The customer deducts TDS from your bill, and you deduct TDS from the owner’s payment. By the time the money settles, your ₹7,000 margin has been through ten calculations, usually spread across a diary, WhatsApp, an Excel sheet and Tally.

Most brokers don’t lose money on bad loads. They lose it in that arithmetic: an advance nobody recorded, a detention charge never billed, TDS deducted but never claimed back. FleetSetu’s brokerage software is built to hold all of it in one place, from the first phone call to the final ledger entry.

Every load starts as an enquiry. In FleetSetu you record it once: customer, route, material, weight, vehicle type and the rate you quoted. When you fix a market truck, you add the owner, vehicle number, driver and the hire rate you agreed. The margin on that load is on the screen before you confirm it, not three weeks later when the bills come in.

The lorry hire account is where most broker disputes start. The owner remembers ₹40,000 advance and ₹3,000 for diesel on the way. Your accountant remembers ₹40,000. The driver says the halting charge was promised on the phone. Nobody is lying; it just wasn’t written down in one place.

FleetSetu keeps a running hire account for every load. Advances at loading, extra cash on the road, detention, shortage and damage deductions, and the final balance after POD all sit against the same load, on both sides of the deal.

Because the load already carries the freight, charges and deductions, billing is mostly a click. Bill a customer per load, or club a month of loads into one invoice. On the other side, record the truck owner’s bill and every payment against it.

Many brokers also rent out containers, or hire them from others for a customer’s load. The money is in the days, and the leaks are in the days nobody counted. A container that came back on the 18th but was billed till the 12th is pure loss.

FleetSetu tracks each container by number: who has it, from which date, at what rate, and when it came back. Rent is worked out from the actual days out, whether you charge per day, per trip or per month, and goes straight onto the customer’s bill. If you hired the container from someone else, the rent you owe them is tracked the same way, so you can see the margin on every box.

TDS hits a broker from both directions, and that is why it gets messy. Customers deduct TDS from the freight you bill them, and that money only comes back if you match it against your tax statement. At the same time, you have to deduct TDS on the lorry hire you pay truck owners, unless the owner qualifies for the small-transporter exemption and has given you their PAN and declaration.

Under the Income-tax Act, 1961, these were the familiar Section 194C (payments to contractors, including transporters) and Section 194H (commission and brokerage). The Income-tax Act, 2025, in force from 1 April 2026, carries the same ideas forward under new section numbers. Rates and limits also change from Budget to Budget, so FleetSetu lets your accountant set them rather than hard-coding last year’s numbers.

Everything above flows into one set of books. Freight, lorry hire, container rent, commission, TDS, bank and cash entries all land in the same place, so the reports reflect the business as it is, not as someone remembered to update it.

Most transport software in India is built for fleet owners, people with their own trucks, drivers and diesel to manage. Load-board apps help you find a truck, then leave the money to you. Excel and Tally record the money, but not the load behind it. A broker needs all three joined up, and that is the gap FleetSetu fills.

FleetSetu’s brokerage software comes with monthly and annual packages. Start monthly if you want to run it on live loads for a while before committing. Move to annual once it’s part of how you work, so you budget once and stop thinking about renewals.

Start with a week of your real loads: add your regular customers and truck owners, book the next few loads in FleetSetu, and watch the margin, lorry hire and TDS fill themselves in. Register for FleetSetu Brokerage Software, or book a demo if you’d like us to walk you through it first. You can also call +919220901110.

Comparing options? Our buyer’s guide to fleet and transport software in India and the Transport Management Guide explain what to look for. If you also move goods for large shippers across many branches, see logistics management software for logistics companies.