IFTA Anxiety
Are you a trucker who cares about what goes into your trailer? Do you double and triple check to make sure that everything on your flatbed is secured and stable before you get behind the wheel? Do you take pride in your ride and take the time to clean it up inside and out regularly? Or do you suffer from IFTA anxiety?
Then you’re probably the kind of driver who has already moved to computers for handling your IFTA and invoicing. You’ve already found that the most precise way to handle your business and file your taxes is with a system that gives you the fastest answers. A system that you can have confidence in when you pull out the card to pay your IFTA taxes online.
Yes, we’re all moving that way. Most of the IFTA jurisdictions are now on on the Internet and expect you to pay online.
For some of us, that transition is a bit scary. I get that. When you first try to figure out the IFTA and realize the consequences of doing it wrong – it should unnerve you. We’re not talking minor fines. We’re not talking about a slap on the wrist.
I doubt that anyone out there has called how we feel every quarter by the name IFTA Anxiety, but I can’t think of a better name for it. We look at 3 months of numbers written in logbooks and scraps of paper.
If there’s one solution for the IFTA anxiety, it’s committing to a single method of tracking your miles. Whatever it is, you don’t skip it. You could set an alarm to remind you to check your miles every hour, just in case you forgot to write them down at the state border… You could use a log book and religiously record every mail… But skip one recording and you’re in trouble. Use one spare piece of paper that’s stuck in your pocket without being noted in your logbook and.. you’re in trouble.
IFTA anxiety comes from lack of good record-keeping plus a failure to have a system in place during the rest of the quarter.
If you wait until the month the IFTA is due, you’re creating anxiety.
You need a daily method to make it work, not a quarterly make-it-work-or-else session with aspirin and pencils on paper.
Oversize Loads
Oversize loads take an oversized amount of attention. Permits. Escorts. Care when you’re taking those tight turns that may shift your load from one side to another in a single second. I’ve hauled a lot of those loads. You can’t ever lose your concentration – the price is too high when an oversized load goes bad.
An oversized load of anxiety about the IFTA can do the same thing. Some people get so nervous about the IFTA that they freeze and procrastinate. Others are willing to pay someone any amount of money just to take care of it for them. Both of those are overreactions. There’s a much better way.
And as much as we might hate to admit it, those people who always have everything double and triple checked know what they’re doing. It’s going to an online program that will take care of the IFTA – the record-keeping, the math, the computations and the reports.
TruckingOffice and IFTA
It’s about getting it done simply. Does it have to make us crazy and take hours?
No. It doesn’t and it shouldn’t.
It’s not even about trying to keep records per state every day… I can’t even imagine trying to do that, but I suspect I know a few truckers who probably tried this to make the IFTA easier. Maybe they create multiple spreadsheets and track everything on Google or Excel.
It’s really about simplifying everything from the very beginning. From the time you get a dispatch until you’ve paid those IFTA and IRP taxes, those numbers are just numbers recorded somewhere. What we need as truckers is a simple way to use those same numbers over and over for all the different things we have to pay attention to: invoicing, maintenance, taxes.
TruckingOffice makes it simple. You enter a dispatch. You enter a few numbers. And you’re done. Then when it’s time to file the IFTA, there’s no anxiety. There’s a single report that shows you everything and once you’ve paid those taxes – you’re done. In minutes. Not hours, Not days. Minutes.
You may be reluctant to try a software package. Money to buy it. Time to learn it. But you’ll find that TruckingOffice isn’t expensive and it’s easy to learn. We’ve got people on staff to help you. We’ll give you a free trial to check it out. We’ll even let you input every load you hauled in the last quarter and figure out your IFTA with that data and never give us a penny or a credit card number.
How can you beat IFTA anxiety? With TruckingOffice.
PS – Does that picture remind you of Bruce the shark from JAWS too?
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