What exactly is changing in transport from 1 July 2026?
Three changes are arriving at the same time. The truck levy is being introduced: trucks will pay per kilometre driven on designated roads. In addition, the minimum wage is rising, which feeds directly into labour costs for drivers and administrative staff. Finally, the tachograph requirement is being extended, meaning more vehicles must have a digital tachograph and the associated records must be stored correctly. Each of these changes generates additional documents and additional checking work: levy summaries, revised invoices, pay slips and tachograph printouts that all end up somewhere in your administration.
Higher costs per trip demand more accurate invoicing
The truck levy is a variable cost that differs per trip, depending on the route driven. If you want to pass those costs on to clients, you need to be able to link the levy per order to the correct invoice lines. That sounds straightforward, but in practice orders, CMR waybills and invoices at many transport companies still run separately from one another. A staff member copies data from one place to another. When the levy now also varies per trip, the risk of errors and disputes with customers over the final settlement increases. The administration that tracks this manually will soon have more work to do for the same result.
More document volume, not fewer staff
A common argument is: we automate the document flow so we can reduce headcount. That is partly true, but the more direct reason to invest in document processing now is different: volume is rising. More trip records, more levy summaries, more corrected invoices because a cost item was previously missing. If you continue to process that manually with the same team, you will be falling behind. At Cabooter Group, a logistics and transport company working with dottle, the volume exceeds 70,000 documents per year. More than 85 percent of these are processed fully automatically, resulting in a saving of approximately 110,000 euros per year. Those economies of scale become more relevant as document volumes grow due to new regulations.
Tachograph requirements: more printouts, more checks
The extension of the tachograph requirement means more vehicles must record trip data. That data must be retained, is subject to inspection on request and must align with the trip assignments in your TMS. In practice, this involves PDF exports or printouts that someone manually links to the correct order. That is precisely the kind of repetitive linking work where errors creep in, especially as volume increases. Anyone who has not yet automated the link between trip records and order administration will feel this more acutely after 1 July.
What happens if you do nothing now?
Costs per trip are rising, document volumes are increasing and the error rate in manual processing stays the same or grows. The combination of the truck levy, higher wages and additional registration requirements makes the administrative burden in transport concretely heavier. That is not a reason to panic, but it is a good moment to look at where the most time is lost in the document flow. Orders arriving by email and manually retyped into a TMS, CMR waybills scanned and manually linked, invoices with a different layout for each customer: these are the areas where automation delivers immediate returns. Not because it is technically interesting, but because the workload will simply keep climbing otherwise.