A trucking app for owners is a phone app on which India's one- and two-truck owners find loads, pay tolls and run their trucks. In India, most trucks belong to owners like these. An owner may drive one truck himself and hire a driver for the second. Such an owner has no office and no software, only a phone.
The app does several jobs in one place. It shows loads from shippers and transporters on the routes the owner chooses. It sells and recharges the truck's FASTag, the tag on the windscreen from which electronic tolling deducts each toll. It offers a fuel card for buying diesel. It sells a GPS tracker, a telematics device that shows the owner where each truck is on a map. Some apps also offer loans to buy a truck, insurance and a way to pay drivers. Owners pay and receive much of this money through a UPI payment app.
Money is the owner's hardest problem. Diesel and tolls must be paid during the trip, but the freight is often paid weeks after delivery. The cash a business needs before its customers pay it is called working capital, and a small owner has very little. The apps help in two ways. They arrange an advance on the freight when the truck is loaded. And they show every toll and fuel payment in one place, so the owner knows what each trip really earned.
Take, for example, an owner in Namakkal, a town in Tamil Nadu known for its trucking businesses, who owns two trucks. One truck has just delivered eggs in Hyderabad and must come home. In the app, he searches for loads from Hyderabad towards Tamil Nadu. He finds 20 tonnes of cement for Salem, with 80% of the freight paid as an advance on loading. He accepts the load, and the shipper's employee confirms the truck's number. While the truck is loading, the app shows that its FASTag balance is ₹900, too low for the tolls ahead. He recharges it with ₹4,000 by UPI. The advance reaches his account that evening. He loads ₹10,000 of it onto the driver's fuel card, and watches on the GPS map as the truck leaves Hyderabad.
Behind the loads in the app is a digital freight marketplace, which matches the loads with trucks. Over months, the app also builds up a record of each truck's trips, tolls, fuel and payments. So it becomes the small owner's fleet management system, on a phone. A large fleet buys separate software for each of these jobs. A small owner gets them together, in one app that he already carries.