Most yards under about forty doors do not run yard management software. They run a spreadsheet, and the good ones run it well. This is the spreadsheet: a yard log for gate in and out, a live view of what is in each spot, a dwell tab that tells you what has been sitting too long, and a seal log. Free, in Excel or Google Sheets, no email required.

01What is in the workbook

Yard Log — one row per trailer visit

This is the only tab you type into every day. Gate in fills the left half (date, time, trailer number, carrier, loaded/empty, seal, spot, driver, reference, who checked it in). Gate out fills the right half (date, time, seal out, who released it). Two columns calculate themselves: Dwell (days) and Status (ON YARD or DEPARTED). Rows are never deleted; the log is your history, and the other tabs read from it.

Current Yard — live location by spot

A row per spot with the trailer that is in it right now, looked up from the newest ON YARD row in the log. You only ever edit the spot names in column A. Occupied spots show green, empties grey, and a trailer over your free-time threshold shows red on this tab too, so the person looking at the yard sees the problem without opening the dwell tab. Three counts at the bottom: occupied, empty, and trailers over five days.

Dwell — what has been here too long

Every trailer on the yard, sorted oldest first, with a YES in the last column once it passes the free-time threshold. This is the tab for the morning call: what leaves today, and what is going to cost money if it does not. The formula is the plain one: now − time in while the trailer is here, time out − time in once it is gone.

Seal Log — every seal event

Applied, verified, broken, resealed — one row each, with the trailer number and where it happened. The sheet looks up the previous seal recorded on the same trailer and flags CHANGED when the number differs. A changed seal is a break, a reseal, or a typo; all three are worth knowing about the same day. Seal numbers are typed by hand on purpose; camera reads of seals are not reliable enough to trust.

Settings

Two numbers: warn at (default 2 days) and alarm at (default 5). Set the second one to your detention free time and the colours on the other tabs follow.

02How to run it

1. Log every arrival at the gate, before the truck moves. A trailer that enters the yard without a row is the one that is lost next week. Read the number off the door; do not take it from the paperwork.
2. Move the spot when the trailer moves. The Current Yard tab is only as honest as the spot column on the log. The rule that works: the move is not done until the cell is changed.
3. Look at the Dwell tab every morning. Two minutes. Anything red gets a phone call; anything yellow gets a plan.
4. Log seals as events, not as a column. One row per time a seal is touched. That is what an auditor asks for, and it is the only way a changed seal shows up.
5. Close the row at gate out. Date, time, seal out, released by. The dwell number freezes and the trailer drops off the yard view.

Pair the log with a periodic yard check: the check finds the spots where the log drifted, and the log is where the fix goes.

03When the sheet stops working

A spreadsheet is a fine yard management system for one person at one desk. It breaks in predictable ways when the yard gets busier than that, and the break is usually not the spreadsheet's fault. As one ops manager put it in a July 2025 r/logistics thread, they were running a 3PL yard of roughly 40 dock doors and 60-plus appointments a day on Google Sheets and a whiteboard, and had reached the point of asking what software to move to.

Around 40 doors and 60 appointments a day, on a spreadsheet and a whiteboard, is the point where the sheet stops being the system and starts being the bottleneck.Context: r/logistics, "Yard management software", July 2025 (paraphrased)

The symptoms, in the order they usually appear:

• Two people need to edit at once. The gate clerk is logging an arrival while the yard driver is moving a trailer. One of them wins; the other one's change is lost or overwritten, and nobody knows which.
• The sheet lives inside; the trailers move outside. Moves get written on a hand or a whiteboard and keyed in "later". The Current Yard tab is now a picture of an hour ago.
• Around 40 doors or 60 appointments a day, the log has more rows per shift than one person can type without transposing digits, and a transposed trailer number is a lost trailer.
• Shift handoff. First shift knows which rows are stale. They go home. Second shift trusts the sheet.
• Someone asks for the history. A customer wants every seal event on a trailer from three weeks ago, and the answer is a filter on a tab that has been sorted and re-sorted forty times since.

The test is simple: if the person updating the sheet is not the person standing next to the trailer, the sheet is already wrong more often than you think.

When you outgrow the sheet

Vantage keeps the same columns this sheet has — trailer, carrier, loaded/empty, seal, spot, time in, time out, dwell — but every row is written from the phone of the person standing at the trailer, at the moment it happens. Gate in is a photo of the trailer number, a yard move is one tap at the new spot, and the yard list is the same on every phone and every desk. It keeps working when the signal drops at the back fence and syncs when it comes back. If the sheet is holding up, keep it. If it is the thing everyone is waiting on, try the app on a few real arrivals.

FAQ