Head to head

It runs the company. It was never asked where the weight sits.

McLeod LoadMaster is one of the deepest transportation management systems in North America, and carriers run on it for decades for good reasons. None of those reasons is axle physics.

McLeod LoadMaster
14 capabilities
Public documentation, August 2026

Who it is for

Established asset-based carriers running everything on one system.

Order to invoice, driver to settlement, document to audit. That is a very large amount of software and it works.

Take an order, price it, assign a tractor and a driver, tender it, track it, prove delivery, bill for it, pay the driver, and account for all of it at month end. LoadMaster does that across thousands of loads a week without dropping any of them, with the imaging, electronic data interchange and reporting a large customer expects around it.

Fleets stay on it for a long time, and that is not inertia. A system that holds your rate history, your settlement rules and your customer relationships has accumulated genuine value that a newer product cannot simply offer to replicate.

Weight travels through all of it as a single number, because a single number is all the business process ever needed. It is on the order, in the rate, on the bill of lading and on the delivery paperwork, and it is correct every time it appears.

The weight on the order is correct every time it appears. It is simply not the quantity anybody measures at the roadside.

The number that is right and not enough

Enforcement does not test the number on your order. It tests the steer axle, the drive group, the trailer group, every consecutive combination under the bridge formula, and the tires underneath. A load can be well under the declared figure and still be cited.

The same load your dispatch system knows about, with the physical model behind it and a verdict attached.

The job it was not built for

A weight field is a record, not a physical quantity.

Three reasons a dispatch system cannot close this gap by adding a column.

It has no model of the equipment

Axle positions in millimetres from the front, tire specifications and ratings, kingpin offset, slider hole spacing and travel limits. Without that geometry there is nothing to solve against.

It has no model of the freight

Each item, its weight, its dimensions, whether it is stackable and where it physically sits on the deck. That is what turns a declared weight into five axle numbers.

It has no rule engine underneath

The bridge formula across every consecutive group, the tandem exception, the tire and axle ratings, in the jurisdiction on the route rather than a global setting.

A load that is legal on the order and over at the scale

Steer axle11,600 lb
Drive tandem34,900 lb
900 lb over the tandem limit
Trailer tandem27,800 lb

A worked example. The order said 44,000 lb of freight and 74,300 lb gross, nearly six thousand pounds under the federal limit. Every screen in the office would have shown that load as fine.

Nobody in the office did anything wrong

The order was right, the rate was right, the dispatch was right and the declared weight was right. The pallets went on fourteen inches too far forward, and there is no field on a load record where that fact could have appeared.

Side by side

Fourteen capabilities, and five rows where we are a plain no.

Orders, rating, imaging, data interchange and accounting all belong to the other column, and we have no ambition to contest any of them.

The whole dispatch and TMS category

AxleGuard compared with McLeod LoadMaster across fourteen capabilities
Capability	AxleGuard	McLeod LoadMaster
Order entry, tendering and the dispatch board	No	Yes
Rating, invoicing and driver settlements	No	Yes
Document imaging and paperwork workflow	No	Yes
Electronic data interchange with shippers	No	Yes
Accounting and financial reporting	No	Yes
Gross weight stored on the order	Yes	Yes
Truck-legal routing from real vehicle dimensions	Yes	part
Axle weights solved from where the freight sits	Yes	No
Bridge formula on every consecutive axle group	Yes	No
Tire and axle-rating limits layered on statute	Yes	No
Corrective move in slider holes and inches	Yes	No
Jurisdiction rule set attached to the load	Yes	n/p
Dispatch blocked while a load is over limit	Yes	n/p
Before-and-after audit on the physical load model	Yes	n/p

supportedpart partly, or with limits not supportedn/p not published by the vendor

Methodology

Drawn from publicly published product documentation as of August 2026. Where the vendor has not published a capability the cell reads not published rather than no. Dispatch systems commonly connect to third-party mileage and routing software, which is why the routing row reads part. Verify with the vendor.

When to pick them instead

Four situations where the answer is a dispatch system.

You need a system to run the company. Orders, rates, settlements, accounting and the history behind all of it — that is a transportation management system's job and nothing here replaces it.
Your problem is administrative rather than physical. If loads are late because paperwork is slow, a dispatch system is what fixes that.
You need electronic data interchange with large shippers who will not work any other way.
You are choosing your first real system. Do that first. Adding axle checking to a good dispatch system is easy; the reverse is not.

Working together

Four steps, and none of them is a migration.

01
The order arrives from LoadMaster
Reference, shipper, consignee, commodity, dates and the equipment assigned. Nobody re-keys anything, and the record of the business stays in the system that keeps the record of the business.
02
We answer the physical question
Where that freight has to sit for the steer, the drives and the trailer group to come back legal in the jurisdictions on the route, and what to move if one of them is over.
03
The verdict goes back on the load
Legal, over, or permit required, with the binding rule named. The planner reads it on the board and the driver reads the same thing in the cab.
04
The office does not change
Rating, settlements, invoicing, imaging and reporting all carry on exactly as they do today. One screen is added to a workflow. Nothing is migrated.

The category, the matrix and the neighbours.

Bring a load straight off the board.

A real order with the weight your customer declared and the trailer you would have used. Forty-five minutes, and you find out whether the board and the scale would have agreed.

Bring one lane Open AxleGuard