MILTON, Ont. -- There’s a new board in town. And it’s offering free rides, starting this Friday, which it will continue running for the next 30 days.

The board of course is a load board, and this one is called Load Surfer.

According to Roy Thacker, CEO of Load Surfer, the new freight-and-equipment-managing website is a response to the economic times and his sense that fleets of all sizes are seeking alternative load boards.

For a monthly fee of $125, Load Surfer members get unlimited freight and equipment matching as well as Equifax credit reports and ProMiles mileage for up to five users (additional users available for a nominal charge).

Says Thacker: “Quite frankly, the initial response has been nothing short of overwhelming.”

Thacker says that in addition to offering a standalone website (as most boards currently do) Load Surfer will offer a “TMS Integration Partners Program that offers a very tight integration to several leading dispatch software programs.”

The first wave of integration allows users of Axon Trucking Software, Infosite Technologies, Millogiciel du Camionnage and Trans+Plus Systems Corp. products to post, edit and delete postings from within their TMS applications.

Further integration will allow users to retrieve freight and equipment leads back into their TMS systems, eliminating the need to run two different operating programs.

“Dispatchers,” Thacker says, “either have two screens or they are flipping back and forth between two programs.

“This is highly inefficient. What we are doing is going directly to the dispatch software providers and offering them the opportunity to take the data from our load boards and integrate it into their programs.

“If a carrier has a truck to be unloaded in Dallas and they don’t have a load for it, they will click a button which will post the truck to our board and return freight leads for that truck.”

Another economic-times feature of Load Surfer, Thacker says, is that the company has partnered with the factoring experts TSC Financial Services. Anybody who has tried to collect bills in this industry knows from factoring. Receivables, especially during these times, can do you in.

“If you see a load on Load Surfer that has a ‘thumbs up’ icon, it means that load can be factored through at TSC Financial Services Partner,” he says.