The old joke about hockey is that it’s a fight with a game breaking out. If that’s the case, then trucking is a tax season with driving filling the gaps. IFTA follows us all year long, taking our time and can ruin a completely good weekend by keeping us at our desks for hours. If the IFTA tax filing feels like a fight to you – that’s because it is. And you can end up in the penalty box.
IFTA tax filing every quarter
We hope you had a good summer. Hauled plenty of loads, got good pay, managed to avoid the orange barrels and made the most of your time on the road. But it’s October now, and that means two things.
- Winter is coming.
- It’s IFTA month.
Prepping your equipment for the winter should be on your mind right now while it’s not too cold or rainy. But doing the IFTA at the same time is like time in the penalty box: you can’t do anything else but the IFTA. It’s going to take some time. But, like penalties in hockey, if the team scores, the player in the penalty box gets back out there.
How can you score with your IFTA?
IFTA tax filing done fast and right
It’s the crazy amount of numbers that we have to track. Every mile per state. Every fuel purchase. The tax rate per jurisdiction. If you’re a trucker, you want to haul freight, not try to figure out the money you owe and how much money you might be getting back. Then there’s the whole problem of will you have enough to pay the bills at the end of every quarter – how much money should you be setting aside?
Tracking your IFTA every month might make the task easier – but who wants to do this every three months? Doing it every month? No way!
If a trucker is handling the IFTA numbers by hand, they’d be smart to do it monthly. Breaking down the task to four weeks of numbers instead of 12 would make it easier. Even using a spreadsheet program like Google Sheets won’t guarantee accurate results because entering the data wrong will produce bad calculations. But the process might also increase the chances of numbers being wrong. Finding the error would be very complicated as every step would have to be checked.
In the 21st century, we’ve got computers to manage all of these numbers – in our back pockets. It’s not just the calculator app. It’s a full trucking management program that can take you from invoice entry to IFTA report in a matter of seconds. All that data you can enter when you start with the invoice entry – gets used again and again in TruckingOffice trucking management software. No re-entry. No chance of messing up the numbers.
Skip the penalty box, power play the IFTA
If you’re stuck with a quarter’s worth of numbers and a calculator or a spreadsheet, let’s get out of the penalty box with TruckingOffice software.
Sign up for a free trial. You’ll get access to the entire program for free without a request for payment.
Then use our One Minute Entry form to start filling in your data. You can use the data you’ve collected for the last three months – miles and receipts. Then you can run the IFTA report. It’s done.
But you don’t have to be. Like a great power play, you can overwhelm the opposition because now you’ve got access to other great features:
- maintenance logs and scheduling
- invoice management
- routing with PC*Miler
- load tracking
- driver records/settlements
- trucking business reports.
and much more.
Think of your IFTA as a puck and TruckingOffice trucking management software as your hockey stick. You know what to do.
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