Are You Afraid of the IFTA?

It was a dark and stormy night.

One Friday when the fleet manager went out to inspect each of the trucks, he noticed that in the first truck the odometer was 1,000 miles off from the driver’s logbook.  In the second truck, the difference was even greater… almost 2,000 miles!  In the third truck, he found a receipt for a meal in Iowa – but the routes he’d given the driver didn’t go through Iowa.  The fourth truck was the worst of all – the mileage was nearly 600 miles under what the driver had written in the log book.

The fleet manager went back to his office and looked at the IFTA forms he’d already filled out.  He’d been trusting his drivers to take the routes and report their mileage accurately.

What should he do?

The IFTA Bump In The Night

This was one of my biggest fears while I was running a fleet of trucks.  The drivers didn’t care very much about accuracy.  They didn’t have to pay the IFTA taxes.

Talk about a nightmare – what can you do if you’re not getting accurate numbers from your drivers?

This is part of why companies are looking at electronic logbooks and GPS records as a way to be sure they’re not paying more than they should be in IFTA taxes or IRP apportionment.  Adding another whole state could mean more work for the fleet manager or it could mean paying an accountant for more hours filling out more forms.  For fleet managers with multiple trucks, wrong numbers can total thousands of dollars in mistaken over-payments or underpayments.  No one want to deal with that.

That’s part of why I started TruckingOffice trucking management software.  There are some things a fleet manager can’t control – closed roads, detours, and bad weather might make a trucker select an alternative route.  But I had to have accurate records of the changes that were made.

Maybe this fleet manager can required his drivers to send a picture of the truck odometer every night.  Or maybe he could use TruckingOffice trucking management software.  With our One Minute Dispatch form, the trip is routed and assigned – and easily changed if the driver has to make an unexpected change to the route.  Then when the IFTA forms have to be filled out, the fleet manager can sleep better at night knowing that TruckingOffice’s IFTA report is accurate because it uses PC*Miler to calculate the taxes to be paid.

Never fear your IFTA again and use TruckingOffice.  We’ll even give you a 30 day free trial to discover what a good night’s sleep feels like in January, April, June, and October.