What to look for in DOT compliance software

DOT compliance software is a records system with clocks. The clocks are what you're paying for: medical certificates, annual reviews, annual inspections, Clearinghouse queries, roadside correction deadlines, and the retention periods that keep running after a driver leaves or a truck is sold. Below are eleven questions that separate a system that keeps those clocks from one that keeps a nicer-looking folder. They apply to any vendor, including Ledger Road, and where a question is easiest to explain with a named example the example is a published fact and not an opinion. Nothing on this page is required by law. A spreadsheet is still legal, and the last section says when it's the better answer.

1. Does it know the retention periods, or just store files?

Storage is cheap and every product has it. The question is whether the system knows that a driver qualification file is kept for three years after employment ends under §391.51(c), that a vehicle's maintenance records are kept for six months after the vehicle leaves your control under §396.3(c), and that records of duty status are kept for six months under §395.8(k). A system that knows this shows you the date each record may be destroyed and keeps the record until then even though the driver or truck it belongs to is gone. A system that doesn't know it will happily let you delete a departed driver, and take the file with them.

Ask to see a driver who left last year. If the answer is that they were archived and their documents are in the archive, ask when the archive may be emptied. If nobody can tell you, the retention clock lives in your head, and you could have kept it there for free. The full schedule is in the guide on how long to keep DOT records.

2. Can an investigator open your records without logging in to the vendor?

§390.32(d) permits electronic records on the condition that they can be retained and accurately reproduced for the people entitled to see them. That is the reproduction test, and it's the one an electronic system is most likely to fail on the day. A review happens in your office or by correspondence. The investigator has their own laptop and their own rules about what they can install and which accounts they can create. A guest login to a vendor portal is not something every investigator will use, and a link that expires is not something you want to be explaining.

The answer you want is a self-contained file: a folder or archive holding the records, the original scans and the signatures behind them, that opens on any computer with nothing to install and no account. Ask the vendor to produce one during the trial and open it on a machine that has never seen their product. If it needs their site to render, it isn't a reproduction. It's a view.

3. Is there one inspection clock per unit, including trailers?

§396.17(a) requires every commercial motor vehicle to be inspected, and for a combination that means each component: the tractor, the semitrailer, the full trailer, the converter dolly. §396.17(c) then says none of them may be used unless each has passed that inspection in the preceding twelve months. A tractor and trailer are two clocks, not one. A system that tracks "vehicles" and means power units has left the trailer fleet off the calendar.

Then ask how trailers are billed. Products priced per asset count a trailer as an asset, which is reasonable in an inspection app and expensive in a records system where a ten-truck carrier might run thirty trailers. Ledger Road prices on power units and never bills a trailer or a dolly, though each one carries its own clock. Other vendors make other choices. What matters is that you can put every unit you inspect into the system without the unit count becoming the thing you manage.

4. Does it treat "no report required" as normal?

Under the federal rule a property-carrying driver files a daily inspection report when there's a defect to report. A clean walkaround with nothing found doesn't require a report, and a day with no report is a normal day. Many carriers ask their drivers for a report every day anyway. That is a sensible company policy, and it's a company policy, not a federal requirement. The guide on DVIR requirements goes through the rule.

Watch how the software handles it. If a day with no report shows as a warning, a red cell or a missed task, the product has confused your policy with the law, and your drivers will learn to file blank reports to make the screen go green. If the software lets you choose daily reports as your own policy and labels it that way, it has read the rule. Ask which one it is before the drivers see it, because the drivers are the ones who'll be trained by the screen.

5. Does it cite the paragraph?

This used to separate the serious products from the rest. It no longer does. FileFlo names the CFR section behind each gap it finds, Foley's material cites Part 391, and others do the same. Take it as table stakes. What's still worth checking is where the citation sits. A citation on the brochure tells you the vendor has read the rule. A citation on the gap, next to the specific missing item on the specific driver, tells you that the person who has to fix it can check it themselves, which is what a citation is for.

Read one of them. Pick a gap the system reports, follow the citation to eCFR, and see whether the paragraph says what the screen says it says. This takes five minutes and it tells you more about the product than the demo will.

6. Who owns the data when you leave?

Three questions, and the answer to each should be written in the terms rather than said by a salesperson. First, can you export everything, in a format you can read without the product, at any time, without asking? Second, what is the notice period, and is there a fee for leaving or for the export? Third, what happens to the scans and the records after you stop paying: how long they stay readable, whether you're told before they're deleted, and whether a failed card payment locks you out of a file you're legally required to hold.

The last one is bigger than it sounds. A review doesn't wait for a billing problem to be sorted out. Ledger Road's published position is that a lapsed payment makes the account read-only with exports still working, that there is no notice period, and that records stay exportable for ninety days after a cancelled subscription ends. Whatever a vendor's position is, get it in the terms. People in this trade have been burned before, and a trial that went badly is a much smaller loss than a year of records that can't be got out.

7. What does it not do?

A vendor that can't answer this is selling something they haven't finished thinking about. Hours of service under §395.8 is recorded on an electronic logging device, which is a certified product on FMCSA's list and a different purchase. Dispatch, loads and invoicing are a transport management system. Drug and alcohol testing is run through a consortium. Clearinghouse queries are run on the federal portal by a person, because FMCSA publishes no interface for running them from software; a product can record the query, its result and its date, and that is all any product can do. Records software covers the driver, vehicle and maintenance files, and a product that claims all of the above is usually strong in one and thin in the rest.

There is real overlap and it's worth mapping. An ELD vendor often covers daily inspections. It less often covers driver qualification files, medical certificate expiry or the annual review. If your ELD already does inspections well, a records product that also does them isn't giving you much there, and you should weigh it on the driver files alone. For the record, Ledger Road is not an ELD, doesn't record hours of service, and doesn't do dispatch.

8. How is it priced, and what starts the meter?

Insist on seeing a price before a demo. In this category the split is clear: the older vendors, Foley, Tenstreet and Samsara among them, publish tiers or fleet-size brackets and then a form; the newer ones publish a number. FileFlo publishes flat tiers by truck count. DOTDriverFiles publishes a per-driver monthly price with a free tier. Simply Fleet publishes a per-vehicle price with a five-vehicle minimum and a free plan. TenFour publishes an annual price per truck for a managed service. Ledger Road's are on its pricing page. None of these is the right model for everyone, but every one of them can be compared, and a price you can't see can't be.

Then ask what the unit is and what starts the meter. Per driver rewards a carrier with few drivers per truck and punishes team operations. Per truck rewards the opposite. Per asset counts trailers. Ask what a disposed truck costs after it leaves: it should stop counting the day it goes and its records should stay, because §396.3(c) keeps them for six months after. Ask about setup fees, minimum terms and whether the price you're quoted is the monthly price or the annual one divided by twelve. Ledger Road's unit is the power unit, with a number included in each tier and packs of five trucks above that, no setup fee, month to month. Other models are defensible. Hidden ones aren't.

9. Does it work in the yard with no signal?

The walkaround happens where the truck is parked, which is where the signal isn't. A daily inspection that needs a connection to start, to attach a photo or to sign gets done later from memory, or gets done on paper and never reaches the system, which is the exact gap you were paying to close. Ask the vendor to demonstrate the driver's inspection with the phone in airplane mode, from opening the unit to signing, and then show the report arriving once the phone is back on the network. If the answer is that coverage is usually fine, that's a no.

10. Can a driver use it without an account, or without their own phone?

This is the question vendors' pages don't ask, and it's the one that decides whether the product gets used. Drivers refuse to put company software on their own phones, and they say so as a hard line: it tracks them, it wants their photos and contacts, and it follows them off duty. Discounts don't touch that objection because it isn't about price. It's about deployment.

So ask what happens when a driver says no. Does the inspection work on a shared tablet kept in the yard, or a company phone left in the cab? Can a driver sign as themselves on a device that isn't theirs, so the record still says who did the walkaround? What does the app ask permission for on the phone, and is any of it beyond what the walkaround needs? And what is the driver told, in writing, about what the record contains? §390.32(d) requires proof that the person consented to electronic records, which means a disclosure the driver can read and a way to withdraw from it and go back to paper. A vendor who hasn't thought about the driver who refuses hasn't deployed to a real fleet.

11. Is there a date on the compliance content?

The rules move. Since June 2025, medical examiners send CDL and CLP holders' results to the state electronically and the driving record, not a paper card, is the record in the file. An exemption on how long a carrier may rely on a paper copy while the state record catches up runs out on 11 October 2026. Help pages written before June 2025 still tell carriers to file the card, and plenty of them are still up.

Look for a review date on the vendor's compliance content, and then check whether the content matches that date. A page with no date has not been checked, whatever it says. Every guide on this site carries the date it was last read against eCFR, and you should hold this one to the same standard: the review date is under the heading, and if it's older than the last rule change you know about, read the rule and not the page.

When you don't need any of this

A carrier with one to three trucks, a stable roster and one person who opens the spreadsheet every month doesn't need software, and no vendor should tell you otherwise. The guide on spreadsheet versus software sets out where that line is and gives you a free template for staying on the near side of it. If you are past the line, take the eleven questions above to every vendor you're considering, and hold each of them to the same answers.