The end of this month is the IFTA deadline. Have you filed yours yet? If you’re using TruckingOffice PRO, you can hold off until the very last minute if you want. If you don’t use TruckingOffice PRO, you might be in trouble.
IFTA Due Dates
IFTA is due on the last day of January, April, July, and October, unless the day falls on the weekend. Then it’s due on the next business day. That’s simple enough to remember. It may be the only simple part of filing IFTA.
If you want to file IFTA now, you have to have the last quarter’s data handy. All the miles per state. All the fuel receipts. The amounts of fuel taxes paid. The current tax rates for every state you drove in. Then the math begins.
It’s hard to think that anyone files IFTA now without using a computer program to compute it for them. While the IFTA tax program was set up to save truckers time and work, it’s still a complicated formula.
What seems very confusing to us is to hear about how some owner-operators choose to use a separate IFTA prep program rather than their dispatch and invoice program. Or that they’re using three different platforms, or that they struggle to use Google to do it all for them.
To file IFTA now, on the day it’s due, it’s late in the game if you’re not using a complete trucking management software program.
What’s your hourly rate?
How much do you earn per hour?
I know, we’re not supposed to ask such personal questions, but it’s an important factor in how you look at your IFTA filing.
The time it takes for you to enter data and get a calculated total taxes due is time that you cannot be driving.
So if you’re taking time to enter data, you should consider how much it costs you to take care of that task.
Don’t want to do the math?
We don’t either. Let’s say that the average owner-operator takes 2 hours to handle the data entry for a quarter. Based on Zip Recruiter, the national average hourly rate for owner-operators is $117. So two hours of off-the-road work costs an owner-operator $234 on top of whatever their IFTA prep software charges.
What can you spend $234 on? Multiply that by 4 and you’ve got over $1,000 worth of time invested in the IFTA alone.
To file IFTA now, it’s adding salt to the wound of paying extra taxes anyway, to think that it costs the average US trucker so much for a tax payment is just an insult.
If this is your first time filing your IFTA fuel tax return then please check out our article about How to File Your IFTA Report.
What Other Choice Do You Have?
Glad you asked. The data you need for IFTA comes from a variety of places. The ELD data is critical to be sure that the IFTA report is accurate. Then there’s the dispatch routing and the actual miles recorded in each state or jurisdiction. The records of fuel purchases are kept in the invoice program as an expense.
The better choice is to use a complete trucking business software, one that tracks all these different items. A software problem that starts from dispatch to routing to invoicing. Then to file IFTA is simply a matter of collecting the numbers, tracking the state fuel tax rates, and totaling it up.
(TruckingOffice PRO updates all of the tax rates per state or jurisdiction, so you can be confident that the rates are correct. We also have an integrated ELD that makes sure the miles are absolutely correct.)
When you use TruckingOffice PRO, a complete trucking management software, IFTA prep isn’t a matter of hours. It’s a matter of seconds. Your data is safely stored and accessible, even in the cab of your truck. You can get an IFTA report to file IFTA now in seconds.
If you wait for the last minute, we hope that the website lets you. Too many truckers filing at the same time can crash a system. So maybe don’t wait until 11:59 tonight to file.
If You Don’t Use TruckingOffice PRO Yet…
Give it a try on us. That’s right. Free trial for you to discover the power of a complete trucking software to run your business.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks