Need info on how to properly log on a short haul exemption log book.


corneileous

Well-Known Member
Hey guys, looking for information on how to properly fill out the logbooks for short haul drivers. My company just got audited and we just found out that we’ve all been filling our logbooks out the wrong way this whole time. Apparently, we still can’t show over 11 hours worth of driving but if we break our time down to a total of 3 hours off duty, we can legally work up to 14 hours a day now with the new rule...used to be 12, but now it’s 14....and of course, our radius just got extended to 150 air miles instead of just 100 but that’s not what I’m inquiring about.

But here lies the problem... I’ve included a copy of one of my “corrected” logs just for reference but if you look at what I wrote on Monday the 26th of last week, over in the left column is where I wrote down my times for going from on duty to off duty. In the tall boxes to right of those, that’s where you put down basically how many hours you drove because as you can see, I started my time at 6:30AM and went off duty at 12:30PM for a total of 6 hours. Then I came back on duty at 12:45PM, and ended the day at 4:00PM for a total of 3 hours and 15 minutes.
How this log sheet is below in the picture, is supposedly how it’s supposed to be done now, which as you can see, I went on the clock at 6:30 in the morning, and went home at 4 in the afternoon for a total time of 9 and a half hours on duty but if you add up the 6 hours in the top, vertical box with the 3.25 hours in the box below it, that’s only 9.25 hours because that’s minus the one and only 15 minute break I took. But basically in those four vertical boxes on the right for each day, whatever numbers you have there, they can’t total more than 11 hours but if you went on the clock at say, 6am and didn’t turn it off until 6 in the evening, you have to show 12 hours there at the bottom of the day but there must be a one hour break somewhere so that your driving hours doesn’t exceed 11 hours.

Like I said, this how we’re supposedly supposed to fill our logs out from now on. Is this correct?

Used too; and what we “assumed” before was that you could work 12 hours- or now 14 with the new rule but whatever numbers you put in that right hand column, had to equal how many hours you worked from which you got to work and when you left to go home. If you didn’t take no breaks, then at 6 in the evening after starting at 6 in the morning, you were done but if you took a total of an hour off during the shift, you could now run till 7- still has to only show 12 hours but that one hour total worth of breaks gave you an extra hour. Like I said, this is what we were all under the assumption of what was ok but supposedly, not.


I guess it’ll be a while before the boss learns how bad the mistakes cost him but this is the first time he’s ever been audited and since we primarily focus on local driving and not OTR, it sounds like it might just be a slap on the wrist and being told to do it the right way from now on.
 

Attachments

  • FC98F28D-9D06-4122-8E8E-5E4805182158.webp
    FC98F28D-9D06-4122-8E8E-5E4805182158.webp
    201.2 KB · Views: 17
Exempt from the daily loose leaf....as long as we stay within our 150 mile radius, we don’t do a loose leaf which is great because if we go outside that radius more than 8 times in a month- which means if we do, we have to log on a loose leaf, we’ll have to run elogs....well, that is if your truck is newer than a 2000 model year that would have enough of a computer system enough for an elog to properly run off, that is, but if we don’t go outside that radius and log onto a loose leaf for that day, as long as we don’t do that more than 8 times a month, we’ll never have to go ELOG.
 
Exempt from the daily loose leaf....as long as we stay within our 150 mile radius, we don’t do a loose leaf which is great because if we go outside that radius more than 8 times in a month- which means if we do, we have to log on a loose leaf, we’ll have to run elogs....well, that is if your truck is newer than a 2000 model year that would have enough of a computer system enough for an elog to properly run off, that is, but if we don’t go outside that radius and log onto a loose leaf for that day, as long as we don’t do that more than 8 times a month, we’ll never have to go ELOG.
Oh so you go outside the radius once in a while... now that makes a bit more sense

Just turn in a paper log on those days

BTW... that’s a rolling 30 day period, not just one particular month
 
Oh so you go outside the radius once in a while... now that makes a bit more sense

Just turn in a paper log on those days

BTW... that’s a rolling 30 day period, not just one particular month
Well, now that we have 150 miles to operate in to stay considered as local, that’s just fewer loose leafs we’d have to use but still, we still have to log on a driver’s log sheet, just like an OTR driver; it’s just that our log sheets have a full week on them. But to confuse ya more, we do have a checkbox we can check for if one of those days we do have to go outside that radius, we can put a checkmark in thats labeled, “check here if log sheet attached”.
 
Well, now that we have 150 miles to operate in to stay considered as local, that’s just fewer loose leafs we’d have to use but still, we still have to log on a driver’s log sheet, just like an OTR driver; it’s just that our log sheets have a full week on them. But to confuse ya more, we do have a checkbox we can check for if one of those days we do have to go outside that radius, we can put a checkmark in thats labeled, “check here if log sheet attached”.
Ok now I gotcha

Thats just your company going above and beyond regs. Them daily sheets aint really needed

Ive been log exempt for 15 years and have never had to do one of those, beyond the occasional paper log for over 12 hours. And now thats 14 hours so even less of a concern
 
So is that the pay sheet you get paid from? Or is there a time card at the office?


If you dig into the law a bit further,


The time of departure to the time you return to your point of origin is the full time you have to report.
 
Ok now I gotcha

Thats just your company going above and beyond regs. Them daily sheets aint really needed

Ive been log exempt for 15 years and have never had to do one of those, beyond the occasional paper log for over 12 hours. And now thats 14 hours so even less of a concern
Says where? If it didn’t matter, then why did they change the law for us short haul drivers to where we can work up to 14 hours instead of 12? Extend our radius from 100 to 150? We still have to log what we do and have a bona fide logbook that we have to use.

but what is it you do/did that said you didn’t have to use a logbook?
 
Last edited:
one error I see is your math,you added all the times together instead of just adding on duty time like it asks for.I was talking to OOIDA today about the 100 mile radius,and he said all I need is starting times and qutiing times.I could write it on a piece of paper if I wanted too.
If I didn`t work,leave it blank.No showing a 30 minute break too
 
So is that the pay sheet you get paid from? Or is there a time card at the office?


If you dig into the law a bit further,


The time of departure to the time you return to your point of origin is the full time you have to report.
Well no, not really because we don’t get paid by the hour, we essentially get paid a percentage of what we haul or depending on the type of job, it might be by the load or it might be by the hour but in the end the way we make our money, there’s a percentage of what our truck earns.

But yeah, in response to that last part you said, that’s essentially what we now found out we have to do because if we start our time at six in the morning for example and we park the truck and go home at 6o’clock in the evening, we have to put down that we worked 12 hours; but, we have to be off duty somewhere throughout the day for a total of at least one hour if we put down 12 hours for the day because you can’t just say that you started your time at six in the morning, drove until noon, came back on duty 15 minutes later and then say you drove from 12:15 until 6 o’clock that evening because when you add the 6 hours that you wrote next to your first start and stop times, and then 5.75 hours next to your 12:15-6:00 time, you’re going to show that you’ve got 11 and three-quarter hours of driving. As I said, this is the way I understand it now so I was just looking for verification from somebody else who does these types of logs.
 
Says where? If it didn’t matter, then why did they change the law for us short haul drivers that we cannot work up to 14 hours instead of 12? We still have to log what we do and have a bona fide logbook that we have to use.

but what is it you do/did that said you didn’t have to use a logbook?
I do LTL for a nationwide freight line. I only turn in logs for goin over the exemption
 
one error I see is your math,you added all the times together instead of just adding on duty time like it asks for.I was talking to OOIDA today about the 100 mile radius,and he said all I need is starting times and qutiing times.I could write it on a piece of paper if I wanted too.
If I didn`t work,leave it blank.No showing a 30 minute break too
I’m glad you brought that up about the error in the math part because you’re exactly right. The way the wording is on the logbook, it only asked for on duty time. Even though you may have worked from 6:00 in the morning to 6 o’clock in the evening, not all of that time is on duty time; some of that is off duty time but at least the way my boss explained it to me, it doesn’t matter because by adding all the time from when you got in the truck and got out of the truck at the end of the day, and the other part on the right side of those columns is how you differentiate between total hours for the day and then how many hours you actually drove.
 
one error I see is your math,you added all the times together instead of just adding on duty time like it asks for.I was talking to OOIDA today about the 100 mile radius,and he said all I need is starting times and qutiing times.I could write it on a piece of paper if I wanted too.
If I didn`t work,leave it blank.No showing a 30 minute break too
But one thing I forgot to comment on, when you said that 00IDA said that all you need to I show was just your starting time and your end time, then how do you show that you kept your driving hours down to 11?

Because see, that’s just it, that’s partly what I’ve been trying to say all along is that if you wrote down you started from six in the morning and drove to six in the evening, that’s 12 hours; that’s going to make it look like you drove for 12 hours and from what we were told from our DOT audit was that we’re not allowed to drive over 11 hours, just like anybody who runs over the road and has to fill out a looseleaf isn’t supposed to.
 
It really doesn’t matter. You are still obligated to return to your point of origin within 14 hours. 395.1(e)


As usual, there are exemptions to every rule.


View attachment 73540
That’s good info; however, I question the part about where it says you have to report back to where you originated because we were under the understanding that your radius resets to where you took your 10. In other words, say like, if you originated from one town, and it doesn’t matter if you had to go outside your radius or not to load but if that place you loaded at was where you were gonna be loading all week and if you stayed in a hotel in a different town all week, shouldn’t your point of origin be reset from where you started your day? That’s how we’ve been doing it and unfortunately, the only time any one of our drivers has ever gotten in trouble for anything resembling that, was a day when we all left the yard to go do a job, and the place we had to take our load to was well within the old 100 mile radius but this one driver took a wrong turn and went through a town that went outside that radius and when he got pulled over for whatever reason, he all the sudden got shut down for ten hours because he wasn’t on a looseleaf and the cop didn’t care that he accidentally went outta route that was the cause of that in the first place so, none of us has ever gotten questioned about our point of origin changing from our home terminal if we have to stay out in a hotel in another town.
 
That doesn’t give info on how to do the logbook for a short hauler, tho.
nothing gives instructions on how to fill out the log book.



Namely for the fact that you aren't required to keep one for short distance.

I would highly recommend you go in and actually read what both myself and @tommyh linked you to. As well as read the guidance. Your answers are there. Not sure how much more you want to be given.
 

Back
Top