It's a Team's Life
Starting the year right!
I am constantly amazed at how much paperwork our one truck generates. I can only imagine how many trees a small fleet kills. Not only does the truck constantly generate paperwork so do we.
Each day I record our expenses in Quicken, keeping track of cash items as well as anything ran through our bank account. I have used Quicken for many years and have it tailored to fit my custom categories. One of the nice features about Quicken is the sub category where I can keep track of special items with in a category. An example is reefer fuel. We use off road fuel in our stand-alone tank that only feeds our generator. I know exactly how much fuel we use in that tank and also how much over all our fuel has cost us for the year.
I keep a spreadsheet to track how many loads we do each month, how many miles we run, our rate per mile, as well as our dead head miles. I use these figures to compare with the last seven years and this helps me decide when is the right time to take off and how we are doing in comparison.
Since FedEx Custom Critical has went to using Electronic Logs I also down load our logs sheets to a file each month. QUALCOMM only keeps the log history for the past six month and at the end of the year I do not want to have to look through all of our BOL’s to see when we were on the road. I download the logs to a file and then I name the file for the month and also include how many days we were on the road. At the end of the year I look at the file names add up the numbers and I know how many days we were on the road for our taxes.
T-Check does not send out a monthly statement and there is only a short time frame at the first of the month that the monthly statement is available to download. I download this to a file and also a hard copy that I store with my fuel receipts.
I started using the NeatWorks Scanner last year for the Mac and I am still very impressed. I know I can throw away my receipts but I am still a little leery of this. The fact that I do not have to worry about receipts fading out is a relief and scanning them is much easier then running them through a copier onto another piece of paper, which will fade.
The NeatReceipts has been instrumental when having warranty work. When we go home I clean out my receipt files and file them away at home. This has been a problem in the past when we needed warranty work and I could not produce the receipt. Now I just print the receipt and we have all the information we need without having to carry a large file cabinet in the truck.
I know there are many ways I could improve my systems and
keep better records, but for the time being I can find the information we want
about our truck and income and expenses.
At the end of the year when get ready to run my reports I have been
known to re-catoragize some of my receipts or decide to get rid of some of
subcategories as being to frivolous to keep a separate account of.
Bob & Linda Caffee
Leased to: FedEx Custom Critical 

TeamCaffee

Saint Louis MO
Expediters 7 years been out here on the road 12 years
Expediting isn't just trucking, it's a lifestyle; 

Expediting isn't just a lifestyle, it's an adventure;

Expediting isn't just an adventure, it's a job;

Expediting isn't just a job, it's a business.