When a carrier working for you can't produce a pre-start, a licence or an hours record, that becomes your problem as much as theirs. Freighthouse gives small operators one place to keep all of it, from $49 a month.
You almost certainly have it covered contractually. There is a clause in the agreement, and a questionnaire that goes out once a year and comes back ticked.
A clause is not evidence. If there is a rollover or a fatigue stop on work you scheduled, the investigation asks what you knew about that operator and what you did about it. A questionnaire signed three years ago does not answer either question.
The carriers on your panel are usually careful people doing the right thing. They also have no office. Their records sit in a glovebox, on a phone, or in someone's head, so getting hold of them means a fortnight of chasing that nobody has time for. That is the gap, and it is not carelessness. It is a two-truck business with no administrator.
Under the Heavy Vehicle National Law, every party who influences a transport task carries a primary duty for the safety of that task, so far as is reasonably practicable. That covers consignors, consignees, packers, loaders and schedulers, not only the operator who owns the truck.
Those duties run concurrently. Yours does not shrink because the carrier holds one as well, and it cannot be signed away in a contract. What you are measured on is whether you did what was reasonably practicable, and in practice that comes down to what you can show.
Six things, recorded while the work happens rather than assembled afterwards. The driver does all of it from a phone.
Around forty checks over the truck, the pan and the load. The form will not accept a submission finished in under five minutes, and a fail on a critical item tags the truck out, so it cannot be dispatched until someone signs it back on. The odometer is captured each time.
Drivers start and end the day on their phone, and the location goes on the record with it. Work time and non-work time are kept apart, so continuous days and hours worked can be pulled as a report instead of being reconstructed months later.
Every driver's licence class and expiry sits in a register, and it flags a month ahead of the date rather than on the morning a client asks. Inductions and anything else with an expiry go in the same place.
Insurances, registrations, safety procedures and accreditation certificates in one folder that the operator owns and can open in front of you. It turns a request that used to take three days into something they answer while you are still on the phone.
Before the day starts the driver confirms they are rested, fit to drive and free of anything that would affect it. A flag stops the shift and puts it in front of the operator. Fatigue is the exposure that reaches furthest up the chain, so it is declared, dated and kept.
The same system also runs proof of delivery, DIFOT reporting, pallet control and warehouse picking. If a carrier wins more of your work, they are not stuck on a tool that only does compliance.
Take this table even if you never speak to us. These are the six records worth requesting from anyone hauling for you, and they are the ones an insurer or an investigator will go looking for later.
| Ask for | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|
| Daily pre-start records, by rego | Shows the vehicle carrying your freight was checked that day, and shows what happened when something failed. |
| Work and non-work time by driver | Fatigue is the exposure that reaches furthest up the chain, because the schedule is set by the customer as often as the carrier. |
| Driver licence register with expiry dates | Nothing is harder to defend afterwards than an unlicensed or wrongly-classed driver carrying your freight. |
| Vehicle registration and insurance currency | Quick to check, and awkward to explain if it turns out to have lapsed months ago. |
| Evidence a defect was closed out | A fault found is only worth something if the truck stopped and somebody signed it back on afterwards. |
| Geo-tagged start and finish of the shift | Turns “he said he started at five” into a record, for hours disputes and for incident timelines. |
Programmes like this usually fail on money rather than on software. The tool ends up costing an owner driver more than they make on the run, so it gets bought, half set up and then quietly dropped, and within a year everybody is back to the annual questionnaire.
It starts at $49 a month for a single truck, deliberately below that line. It is a phone bill rather than a capital decision, and it runs on the handset the driver already carries.
| 1 truck | $49 |
| 2 trucks | $89 |
| 3 to 5 trucks | $169 |
| 6 to 10 trucks | $299 |
| 11+ trucks | Custom pricing |
Which one suits depends on how much of the panel you control and how hard you want to push.
Set it as the minimum record-keeping standard for anyone on the panel. At $49 for a single truck it does not shut a one-truck operator out of your work, which is normally the reason a standard like this gets watered down.
Pay for it yourself across the panel. Against a freight spend it barely registers, and it gets the records in place on the work you care about without an argument over who is paying for them.
Point your carriers at it and leave the decision to them. The operator owns the account and the records, and you end up dealing with people who can answer a question the same day.
Worth saying plainly before you put this in front of anyone internally.
A fatigue-regulated driver still has to keep the written National Driver Work Diary, or an electronic work diary the NHVR has approved. Approval is a formal certification and we do not hold one. What we record is work and non-work time, as a business record and as supporting evidence. If a vendor tells you their app replaces a work diary without that approval, they are wrong.
Western Australia and the Northern Territory sit outside the Heavy Vehicle National Law and run their own heavy vehicle rules. Plenty of national software quietly assumes otherwise. Tell us where the operator runs and we set the records up for that state.
This page sets out how the duty generally works and the evidence that tends to get asked for. It is not advice on your own obligations, so take that from your counsel. The useful question in the meantime is whether you could lay your hands on any of the six records above today.
Freighthouse runs every day inside a working warehouse and delivery operation supplying George Weston Foods and Goodman Fielder, two of Australasia's largest food businesses. The pre-starts, the clock-ons and the licence register on this page are the ones that operation uses. Everything described here was built because that business needed it, and it has been in daily use since.
No. Under the Heavy Vehicle National Law every party in the chain holds its own primary duty for the safety of the transport it influences, and that duty cannot be contracted away. A consignor, a scheduler or a prime contractor holds it alongside the operator, not instead of them.
Because you are judged on whether you did what was reasonably practicable. After an incident, or in an audit, you are asked what assurance you had that the operators carrying your freight were fit, rested and driving a roadworthy vehicle. A clause states an intention. The records are what actually answer the question.
That is what the price is for. It starts at $49 a month with no setup fee, so it is not a capital decision for a one or two truck operator, and it runs on the phone the driver already carries. Programmes like this normally fail because the tool costs more than the operator makes on the job.
No. A fatigue-regulated driver must keep the written National Driver Work Diary, or an electronic work diary approved by the NHVR. Freighthouse records work and non-work time as a business record and as supporting evidence. It does not replace a work diary, and we do not claim it does.
Western Australia and the Northern Territory sit outside the Heavy Vehicle National Law and run their own heavy vehicle rules. Tell us where the operator runs and the records are set up for that state.
They subscribe per truck, set a password and start the same day. There is a page written for them to make it simple. If it suits, a carrier can be running it the same week.
hello@freighthouse.com.au · freighthouse.com.au/subcontractor-compliance