What is TONU on an Amazon Relay invoice?

TONU stands for truck order not used. It is compensation for a load you were dispatched on — you accepted it, you were committed to running it — that was then cancelled before you could complete it. The name is older than Relay and is used across freight generally; on a Relay invoice it shows up as a cancelled line that still carries pay.

That is the whole idea. The confusing part is not what TONU means, it is telling which of your cancelled loads were compensated, which were not, and which of the uncompensated ones you should be asking about.

How TONU appears on the invoice

On the Payment Details sheet, a compensated cancellation is a row whose Item Type reads LOAD - CANCELLED. The money sits in one of two places depending on how the line was generated:

• a dedicated TONU column, or
• a flat figure in Base Rate, with the TONU column empty.

Both mean the same thing. Any reconciliation that only reads the TONU column will miss the cancellations paid through Base Rate, and any check that assumes "cancelled means unpaid" will miss them entirely.

In the sample invoice this tool was built against, every compensated cancellation paid a flat $175. Treat that as one carrier's observed figure, not as a published rate — yours depends on your own agreement with Amazon.

How the same load looks in your trips export

The trips history export describes the same load from the operational side, with no mention of money:

The load-level status is the one to trust: a tour can finish Completed while one of its loads was cancelled along the way, and those mid-tour drops are exactly the cancellations most worth checking for pay.

Nothing in these fields tells you whether pay was owed. The trips file says the load did not run; the invoice says whether you were paid for it. You need both files side by side, which is the entire reason reconciling cancellations is tedious by hand — the cancelled loads are scattered through a 60-column export and the payments are on a different sheet in a different file.

What the files cannot tell you

This is the important limit, and it is worth being blunt about:

The export files do not record who cancelled a load.

A cancelled load with no pay against it might be:

• a load you rejected or returned — in which case nothing is owed, and this is the ordinary, expected case; or
• a load Amazon cancelled after you were committed — which may well warrant a TONU fee.

Both look identical in the data. No tool reading these two files can distinguish them, and any tool claiming to tell you "you are owed $175 here" is guessing. Whether a fee applies depends on the circumstances of the cancellation and on your rate agreement — check the load's history in the Relay portal and your own records, not a spreadsheet.

What to do about it

The practical workflow is narrower than "find my TONUs" and more useful:

1. List every cancelled load for the week from the trips export.
2. Split them by whether the invoice paid anything against them. The paid ones are settled — though they are easy to miss, because your own records show the load as cancelled and you may never think to look for pay against it.
3. Look at the unpaid ones individually. For each, ask whether you cancelled or Amazon did. Most will be yours. The ones that were not are your candidates.
4. Raise those through the Relay portal within 30 days of the invoice date. That window is firm, and it is the reason this is worth doing weekly rather than whenever you get to it.

Step 2 is the one that takes an hour in Excel and is worth automating. LoadRecon does exactly that split — it labels compensated cancellations Paid — Cancellation/TONU and uncompensated ones Cancelled/Rejected — not paid — and it runs entirely in your browser, so the files never leave your machine. It will not tell you whether a fee is owed, because nothing working from these files honestly can. It tells you which loads deserve the question.

For how cancellation rows sit alongside the rest of the invoice, see Understanding Relay payment categories.