Excel template
Dispatch Plan Excel Template
An Excel file that shows which load is on which vehicle, how full it is and which shipments still have no vehicle.
No sign-up, no email. The file downloads directly.
Four sheets in the file
You list your fleet once; after that each shipment only needs a plate.
01
Dispatch Plan
One row per shipment: load, places, date and the assigned vehicle. Capacity and utilisation are formulas.
02
Vehicles
Your own fleet: plate, vehicle type and capacity. The plan sheet pulls capacity from here.
03
Summary
Planned shipments, total load, average utilisation and how many shipments still have no vehicle.
04
How to use
Which columns are formulas, why utilisation stays blank and what 'Unassigned' is for.
Columns in the template
Columns with a blue header are formulas — do not overwrite them. The rest is your data.
Shipment
- Collection date
- Order no
- Customer
- Collection
- Delivery
Load and vehicle
- Load (t)
- Load (LDM)
- Vehicle type
- Plate
- Driver
- Distance (km)
Calculated
- Capacity (t) — formula
- Utilisation — formula
- Assignment — formula
- Status
- Notes
The Vehicles sheet arrives empty: no preset plates, no preset capacity. Until you enter capacity, the utilisation column stays blank too.
Where does Excel stop?
Building the plan in Excel is perfectly workable, and the template exists to make that easier.
The limit shows up the moment the plan starts changing. A dispatch plan is correct in the morning; by midday a vehicle breaks down, a customer moves a slot, a collection runs late. The gap between whoever edits the file and the driver out on the road gets closed by phone.
The second limit is distribution. The moment you send the plan it is a photograph; the driver's copy and yours stop matching and nobody knows which one is current.
The third is feedback. Excel shows you the plan, not what actually happened. Seeing the gap between planned and actual needs data coming back from the trip itself.
Read next
How Is Dispatch Planning Done?
You cannot split thirty jobs across twenty vehicles in your head; dispatch planning is a concrete chain of decisions from order to sequence.
How Do You Run Dispatch Planning in Excel?
What breaks dispatch planning in Excel isn't the spreadsheet — it's two people filling the same one with different decisions at the same time.
How to Calculate and Reduce Empty Miles in Trucking
The empty-miles ratio is a fleet's invisible cost: here is the formula, why empty running happens and how operations cut it down.
Where Does Excel Break Down in Trip Tracking?
Excel is the right tool at small scale; the problem is never the file itself, but what happens once more than one person writes into it.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is the utilisation column blank?
- If that plate has no capacity on the Vehicles sheet, utilisation cannot be worked out. There is no preset capacity in the template; capacity depends on the fleet and the freight, and a figure baked in would be a claim about how much fits on that vehicle.
- What is 'Unassigned' for?
- Rows that have an order number but no plate show as 'Unassigned' and are counted on the Summary sheet. That is the one number to look at in a planning meeting: how many shipments still have no vehicle.
- Do I need to sign up to download it?
- No. We do not ask for an email and there is no form. The file downloads as soon as you click.
- How many rows is the template set up for?
- Formulas are pre-filled for 200 shipments on the plan sheet and 40 vehicles on the Vehicles sheet. For more, copy the last row downwards.
Calculators, Excel templates and reference tables in one place.
All free resourcesWhen the plan changes, everyone sees it at once
In Seferi the dispatch plan lives on one record: change an assignment and the driver's screen changes too, and the trip that actually happened is written to the same place.
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