Why a Relay load shows a $0 base rate — TOUR rows vs LOAD rows

You open the Payment Details sheet, find a load you ran, and its Base Rate reads 0.00. The load was completed. It was not cancelled. And there is a fuel surcharge sitting next to the zero, so the row is clearly not an error.

Nothing is wrong. The money is on a different row.

A Relay invoice is a list of paid items, not a list of loads

Every line carries an Item Type. These are the three you will see week to week:

• TOUR - COMPLETED — the trip-level line. It carries the base rate for the whole tour, and its Load ID is empty.
• 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 paid anyway. See what TONU means.

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.

A worked example

Three rows from a real invoice, one trip:

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. There is no split to find, because Amazon never made one — the tour was priced as a tour.

Why this breaks a per-load spreadsheet

This is the single most expensive misreading of a Relay invoice, and it is easy to make: build a per-load view by filtering to rows that have a Load ID, and every TOUR row silently disappears — along with the base pay.

In the sample invoice this tool was validated against, tour rows accounted for $51,070.26 of a $132,045.26 invoice — 39% of the total. A per-load reconciliation of that week would have come up nearly $51k short and looked, at a glance, like a catastrophic underpayment.

It also means a per-load "was I paid the right amount?" check is misleading on tours. The honest comparison at load level is accessorial against accessorial; the base rate has to be compared at the trip level. That is also why the Estimated Cost column doesn't match load pay.

What to do instead

Group by Trip ID and subtotal, rather than reading loads in isolation:

1. Take the TOUR row's Gross Pay as the trip's base.
2. Add the Gross Pay of every LOAD row sharing that Trip ID.
3. Compare that subtotal — not any individual load — against what you expected for the tour.

Two housekeeping notes if you are doing this by hand: Trip ID carries a T- prefix on the invoice but not always in the trips export, so normalise before matching; and the last rows of the sheet are usually blank plus a grand-total row carrying only a Gross Pay figure, which will double your total if you leave it in.

LoadRecon does this grouping automatically — it shows tour rows alongside their load rows, subtotals each trip, and warns you on screen when the totals do not tie to the invoice. Both files are read in your browser and never uploaded.

For how these rows map onto paid, unpaid, and rolled-over loads, see understanding Relay payment categories.