It was long before COVID-19 when carriers and the trucking industry started experiencing a high increase in businesses closing. Now with a pandemic still amongst us, focusing on how to thrive in our economy isn’t just important, it’s possible.
It’s no secret that you have to spend money to make money, but how you’re spending and when you’re making are all critical elements to managing your cash flow. Whether you are a big fleet manager or just starting as an owner-operator, to be successful you need to keep a pulse on your numbers.
With no time to waste, car haulers can start to leverage technology like a transportation management system (TMS) to help keep the most accurate financial data, greater visibility into cash flow, and easily track payments and revenue.
Here are a few of the ways car haulers can start managing their cash flow with an auto transport TMS.
Expense Tracking
The second you lose visibility into your fixed and variable expenses, the state of your business is at risk. From on-the-road expenses to the daily cost of running a business, the right TMS will enable you to have greater control over your cash flow.
“Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence”
Philip Reyes
Also, sometimes similar extra expenses like broker fees can be found on an order list. These aren’t always easy to find. An advanced TMS dashboard automatically catches these fees and neatly organizes them all by date on accounts payable.
Running a business is costly, and it’s too easy to lose count of which expenses are coming from where and which still need to be paid. A TMS organizes all of your expenses, helps you maintain an accurate view, and let’s you track all unpaid invoices.
Payroll Management
Calculating payment can be a time consuming and inaccurate process if you’re jumping from document to document calculating cost. A TMS integrates to accounting software so that you can streamline payroll as deliveries are completed. It also simplifies the process of considering deductions like fuel taxes, pulling fees, and storage expense. And the right TMS will also give you capabilities like easily separating pay rates per driver all in the same place.
Not only does the TMS help save you time on calculating and managing your payroll, it helps you get greater visibility into how much each carrier is contributing to your revenue without having to bounce around through multiple financial spreadsheets and documents.
Create & Send Invoices
Managing invoices and ensuring they are accurate is critical to managing your cash flow. As orders are complete, you can easily send invoices through the TMS. And since your information from the loads you are invoicing for are on the TMS, it’s an incredibly quick process that populates the information needed, with the ability to attach any additional documents, like the BOL, and then hit send. With an advanced TMS you can also split orders by vehicle and then combine those invoices for clearer communication back to the shipper.
“It shouldn’t be difficult to get paid, so leveraging a TMS to quickly submit for payment will help you maintain the most accurate information quickly.”
If you’re already using an accounting software like QuickBooks, find a TMS with integration capabilities. This will allow for accurate updates onto QuickBooks with all the required information and documents so that you can send out invoices automatically.
It shouldn’t be difficult to get paid, so leveraging a TMS to quickly submit for payment and then easily track unpaid invoices, or identify those who have not yet been invoiced, will help you maintain the most accurate information quickly.
Want to give managing your cash flow a try with no risk to you? Sign up for a free trial with the Super Dispatch Carrier TMS.
