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?
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 fleet manager IFTA nightmare – what can you do if you’re not getting accurate numbers from your drivers?
ELD and IFTA
The time is coming when the IFTA will be based on the ELD in your cab.
This may be a good thing. Electronic logbooks and GPS records are one way to be sure we’re not paying more than we 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.
Fleet Manager IFTA Nightmares Solved?
Will the ELD stop these fleet manager IFTA nightmares?
It might. But the better solution will be using a trucking management software that handles not just the IFTA but many other important fleet manager concerns:
- truck routing
- driver settlement
- invoicing
- maintenance scheduling
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. The invoices are ready immediately after the delivery is complete.
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 free trial to discover what a good night’s sleep feels like in January, April, June, and October.
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