Mark and Mandy have been working together for years on their trucking business – Mandy managed the billing and the paperwork at home while Mark has been on road. This year, with the kids out of the house, Mandy’s been joining Mark in the cab on a few of his regular lanes. Mark decided to help Mandy out with the IFTA tax filing.
Mark was utterly appalled at the scene spread across the kitchen table (and some of it piled on a couple of chairs.) Mandy has been doing all of this by hand for twenty-two years – all by hand. While Mark’s been using the Internet to plot routes and plan loads, Mandy has been quietly writing everything down in a stenographer’s notebook and using sticky notes in his log books.
“I’ve got a system,” she says, but Mark couldn’t believe what she had been doing.
“I never knew what this was like for you, honey!” Mark picked up a stack of papers that Mandy promptly took out of his hands and put themback on the chair. “Don’t get those mixed up – they’re already done.”
Mark backed out of the room and headed for his iPad. He’d been looking at TruckingOffice trucking management software for a while but figured he didn’t need it… until he heard Mandy sobbing in the kitchen. Was this what she went through every three months while he was on the road?
Mark took Mandy out for dinner. Then he grabbed his log book and iPad and started his free 30 day trial with TruckingOffice. Together, Mark and Mandy learned how easy it was to enter the dispatches – he’d been running the same lanes for so long that he didn’t have to think about them, and discovered that TruckingOffice’s address book feature filled in all the same data time after time for them. After entering all the quarter’s dispatches, he and Mandy took a big drink before he hit the IFTA report button.
“It did it in 52 seconds, Mandy!”
Mandy wasn’t so sure, but she checked the numbers. “Yep. They match mine… almost. I have about 80 more miles in Illinois than they do…”
She checked her records as Mark did a quick check on Google maps.
“I was wrong,” she said. “I used the wrong number in my notebook.”
Mark started stacking up the papers and threw them into a storage box. “We are not going back to this method – ever!”
“We can use TruckingOffice all the time,” Mandy said. “You can update in while you’re on the road, and I can get a new computer to manage it here at home.”
Mandy wrote out the check and the two settled in for the rest of the evening, sipping celebratory decaf – because she wouldn’t need the caffeine tonight to stay awake and finish the IFTA filing.
Our IFTA reporting tools make paying your fuel taxes faster and easier. While no one enjoys writing a check to Uncle Sam, we can remove the guesswork and uncertainty that makes the process all that more stressful. With TruckingOffice in your corner, you’ll pay exactly what you owe—never too little, never too much. Plus, you’ll enjoy great features like these:
- Automatic mileage calculation, courtesy of PC*Miler, the most powerful application of its type available
- Easy-to-use entry screens make recording fuel purchases simple
- Software sorts gallons and miles by state automatically
- IFTA reporting tools send the information directly to the state revenue people
- At-a-glance management of all your IFTA records
What is the Cloud?
High-tech folks have their own language. While it makes sense to them, sometimes their terms can confuse the rest of us. Take “the cloud” for example. Most of us grew up thinking of clouds as puffy white things in the sky. But in today’s world, the word also refers to the greatest thing since the invention of the personal computer.
If you’ve been using PCs for a while, then you probably remember having to install software using expensive, fragile CDs. There are plenty of problems with this method, including the following:
- CDs are easily lost, scratched, or broken. When this happens, replacing them may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
- CD-based software quickly becomes obsolete; just ask anyone who has been dealing with Windows for a few years. Microsoft seems to come out with new versions all the time; and, until recently, updating it meant fighting traffic and shelling out big bucks for another set of CDs.
- Remember the term “hard drive crash?” It used to strike fear in the hearts of computer users everywhere. That’s because hard drive problems could wipe out every bit of data on your machine, including irreplaceable business records. If that happened, then the unfortunate user was simply out of luck; the information was gone forever.
You can avoid all those hassles nowadays thanks to our cloud-based IFTA reporting software. Your information and records are stored in supercomputers protected by the same world-class security used by giant firms like Amazon and Walmart. That means that you never have to worry about old or obsolete CDs, hard drive crashes, or natural disasters wiping out your data. Plus, you will always have the latest version of TruckingOffice at your fingertips—no need to buy discs or do time-consuming upgrades! With all these benefits, what are you waiting for? Take our software’s IFTA reporting tools for a free 30-day test drive.
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