Understanding Relay payment categories and TONU

A Relay invoice is not a list of loads. It is a list of paid items, and the distinction is where most reconciliation confusion starts.

TOUR rows versus LOAD rows

Every line on the invoice has an Item Type:

• TOUR - COMPLETED — the trip-level line. It carries the base rate for the whole tour and has an empty Load ID.
• LOAD - COMPLETED — a load-level line under a tour. In practice its Base Rate is zero and the money sits in Fuel Surcharge, Tolls, Detention or Others.
• LOAD - CANCELLED — a cancelled load that was nonetheless paid.

So the pay for one tour is the TOUR row plus every LOAD row sharing its Trip ID. A single-load trip may appear as one row or two depending on how it was dispatched.

Worked example from a real invoice:

The trip earned $1,346.40. Neither load "earned" $1,003.73 on its own, and nothing in the file apportions the base rate between them. This is why LoadRecon subtotals by trip rather than trying to split tour pay across loads — any split would be invented.

Cancellation pay and TONU

TONU — truck order not used — is compensation for a load you were dispatched on that Amazon then cancelled. On the invoice it appears as a cancelled item carrying pay, sometimes with the money in a dedicated TONU column and sometimes as a flat figure in Base Rate. In the sample invoice, cancelled loads that were compensated paid a flat $175 each.

The important limitation: the export files do not record who cancelled. A cancelled load with no pay might be a load you rejected, in which case nothing is owed — or an Amazon-initiated cancellation that should have carried a TONU fee. LoadRecon labels these neutrally as Cancelled/Rejected — not paid and leaves the judgement to you, because guessing would be worse than not guessing.

The five categories

Paid. Matched to an invoice row with a completed item type and pay against it. The ordinary case.

Paid — Cancellation/TONU. Matched to a cancelled item type that still paid. This is money you might otherwise miss, since the load reads as cancelled in your own records.

Completed, not paid. You ran it; the invoice does not show it. LoadRecon splits these by timing:

• likely rollover — the load finished within 48 hours of the Saturday cutoff or after it. Delivery confirmation lag routinely pushes these onto the next invoice. Check next week before doing anything.
• review — payment missing — the load finished well inside the work period, so a rollover does not explain it. These are the ones worth attention while the 30-day dispute window is open.

Cancelled/Rejected — not paid. No compensation received. Expected for loads you rejected; worth a look if Amazon cancelled on you.

Paid, not in trips file. An invoice line with no matching load in your export. Almost always a load from the previous week arriving on this invoice — exactly the other side of the rollover coin. If the end date falls before the work period started, LoadRecon says so explicitly.

Rate variance

LoadRecon compares each paid load's Gross Pay against the Estimated Cost on the trips export and flags gaps over 10%. Two caveats worth holding onto:

• On tours the comparison is between accessorials, because that is what Estimated Cost records at load level. It is not a check on the base rate.
• A percentage test on very small amounts is noisy. A load estimated at $1.13 that pays $1.70 trips the 10% rule on a 57-cent difference. Read the flag as "look at this", not "you are owed money".

On invoice at $0

Occasionally a load appears on the invoice with a Gross Pay of zero. LoadRecon treats these as unpaid rather than paid — the row exists, but no money arrived — and tags them on invoice at $0 so the distinction from a genuinely absent load is visible. It is an unusual state and generally worth querying.