We all know the rigors and efforts that go into running a carrier company — the paper trails, recording errors, and inefficient methods of handling transactions. In this age of computers and technology, there are more efficient ways of handling the day-to-day affairs of your business. Software and systems of operations like ZTrucking are ways by which you can seamlessly run your carrier company and bring in profits as well. Below are ways through which this is possible.
FMCSA Safety Score
Handling the FMCSA Safety Score is one way of increasing profits and customers. The ZTrucking software is built with FMCSA compliance reporting tools. The FMCSA score represents the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) rating system of the FMCSA. It is sometimes referred to as a CSA score or a safety score. This data-driven safety compliance and enforcement program are designed to improve safety and prevent commercial motor vehicle (CMV) crashes, injuries, and fatalities.
This FMCSA score is assigned to the motor carrier and not the driver. The score is based on the records of all the carrier's drivers, including reportable crashes and roadside inspection violations. So, while individual drivers can impact the score, it’s the company itself that is assigned the score.
Effects of FMCSA Score on Carrier Companies
How does FMCSA affect carrier companies' relationships with the public? Having a low (preferably zero) CSA score means carriers are safe and have not committed any violations. But having a high score results in carriers having the following:
This leads to high insurance premiums and deductibles
Disrupts the recruitment and retention of drivers
Results in more and more frequent compliance checks
Attracts fewer customers, since CSA scores are available via public records
Ruins your business reputation
A poor CSA score may put you at a higher risk for FMCSA intervention and investigations. In extreme cases, this can result in an out-of-service order for your business. At the very least, an investigation will be time-intensive and stressful.
Even though some of the CSA BASIC data is private, shippers often look at the public data to help choose safe, reliable carriers. Poor CSA scores can prevent a carrier from getting the most profitable loads
Maintaining a healthy CSA score is one very important aspect of what insurance companies look for when determining the risk involved with insuring your trucking company. Using the ZTrucking software helps maintain and keep you up to date with your FMCSA score along with a few added benefits. Some of these are:
They help reduce any chances of driver-related errors, especially for the newly recruited drivers.
They enable your company to stay up to date with FMCSA compliance by updating new FMCSA requirements & regulations. For example, updates in minimum percentile requirements for DOT drug and alcohol random test coverage.
They integrate driver disciplinary policy actions.
They also have at their disposal a smart document management system that identifies FMCSA required documents, with an integrated notification process for missing and expiring documents.
They also let you use a tool to schedule preventive maintenance and periodic inspection.
How ZTrucking Helps Your FMCSA Score
Carriers spend unnecessarily huge amounts of money for FMCSA audits. Money is not the solution to maintaining your FMCSA audits. Auditing is a continuous task that cannot just be had only once. This is because safety, compliance, and recruitment or addition of new vehicles or personnel should be updated regularly. And by updating these an audit will have to be redone after every update. A one-time audit costs an average of $3,000. The key to improving and maintaining CSA scores is running a safer, more compliant business with the use of reliable software like ZTrucking which will run continuous and ongoing audits for your company at a reduced rate.
Modern Methods of Document Organization
Carrier companies use outdated methods of document organizing. Carrier companies are heavily document-dependent industries. From the drivers' documents to vehicle documents to fleet documents to invoices and paychecks. Even in light of all these storage of documents, they still don’t follow organized methods of storage and fail to produce any documents at any point. For example, if a hired driver doesn't work with them anymore there is a high probability that they would fail the FMCSA audit for some documents asked by the government for them to show.
So instead of these hassles, small carrier industries depend on unsuitable and unreliable applications to organize and save records and documents e.g Microsoft excel, email, folders, etc. When in fact they should be using more suitable smart tools which will enable them to search, produce, identify and notify missing or expired documents. The ZTrucking software can handle all these and more for all organizational and storage keeping of records.
Easy Recruitment
Driver onboarding and collecting complete, validated data is much more efficient with ZTrucking.
Hiring a driver for your carrier company can be a very tedious and tasking process. You most times have to keep following up with the driver to fill in the required accurate data and this usually ends up not working. And the driver would also have to go through rigorous personal training. This includes the right drunk test, the driving test, and so on. Small carrier businesses are so heavily dependent on paper and forms. It becomes too much eventually and they end up missing or end up with incomplete records which may eventually affect their business e.g tax days, audits, reports, and so on. Having ZTrucking software will take away all these challenges and enable you to keep track of records and forms. Provides an Android / IOS supported driver app to handle actions from uploading documents, to receiving paychecks, and notifying users of maintenance scheduling, amongst other features.
Preventive Maintenance
Maintaining a regular preventive maintenance schedule is another way through which software helps carrier companies. Most accidents and violations could be avoided easily by preventive maintenance. But most carrier companies and owners depend on the fares of their drivers to perform this vehicular maintenance. That would be a thing of the past with ZTrucking software. The software would regularly give reminders for maintenance and keep a schedule for preventive maintenance.
Integrated Invoices
Integrated invoices are taken on by the ZTrucking software. Carriers on average send out five invoices per week per truck. And some carriers even go as far as to use factoring companies to pay invoices while others wait till the customers pay them which might take up to a few months. But drivers need to be paid and all this would only delay payment. So being on top of invoices is necessary to identify which fleet is paid or pending or canceled. This is not mainly essential to the day-to-day running of the business but is necessary to avoid overpaying or underpaying yourself and the drivers. Most carriers are also dependent on third-party invoicing which makes it harder to track which load is paid, and all the hassle of double data entry significantly wastes time and money. ZTrucking software would be right on top of every invoice, tracking and making sure they're all paid and in the right order.
System For Driver's Wage Allocation
Allocating and generating wage payments for drivers is one of the many tedious tasks for carriers. This is so for different reasons. Some of these carrier companies may hire owner operators or drivers and could have contract agreements varying from each one. One example is in the area of toll fees or maintenance fees. These fees could be handled by the carriers or in other instances could be paid for by the driver personally. These differences in relations and agreements complicate and affect the calculation of spreadsheets and accounts. That isn't the case with ZTrucking.
ZTrucking considers all the edge cases (deductibles and reimbursable) along with different strategies like fixed price, per miles, or percentile split and generates paycheck in pdf format.
IFTA Calculations Are Done With Ease
IFTA calculation is much more easily done with ZTrucking software. The International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA) tax for trucks, requires managers to successfully calculate IFTA tax and accurately understand how to fill out and file quarterly IFTA taxes and forms. As fuel costs are an important part of any carrier's budget, falling behind on this important expenditure can create big problems.
Calculating the IFTA tax report might take a considerably long time to work on and could even be error-prone. It is important for there to be no errors, which is why you should do it with an already integrated software on ZTrucking. It takes a shorter time and you are sure of accurate results.
Efficient Fleet And Expense Recording
Fleet & Expense Recording can be accessed with the click of a button by using ZTrucking. Most carriers use crude methods like paper or applications like excel to track their fleets and expenses. This is not particularly a bad thing and could even be error free if technical experts can apply functions and procedures to get usable data out of it. But these records are vital to the future of these carriers and should not be taken lightly. Records like invoicing, driver paycheck preparation, income, etc make it all the more essential for the user to use an all-in-one integrated system or software like ZTrucking.
Third-party company integration
Partnering with ZTrucking will allow carriers to solicit information from third-party apps like ELD companies and fuel transaction companies. ZTrucking achieves this by integrating its system with these third-party companies thereby making it easier the get information. Tasks such as Quarterly IFTA preparation and the whole recording of expenses allow carrier companies to further process transactions like generating drivers' paychecks. It is easy to use and ignore.
Fuel Transactions Are Recorded Accurately
Fuel transaction imports from third-party providers can now be recorded accurately. Manually recording fuel transactions could be a very tiring and cumbersome process. So most fuel transaction companies provide means of integration for easier recording of these transactions. It is best to take advantage of this to enable more accurate numbers that would be beneficial to the efficient running of these carriers.
On top of that this fuel metadata could be used for other features like IFTA calculations, fuel theft identification, vehicle performance, and so on.
ELD Data Integration
ELD data integration is also an efficient way of running a carrier company. This is similar to fuel transactions. But ELD records miles and states which could be in the region of thousands of entries. Though most ELDs save this data for you and have their visualization, they won’t account for any access you might have to your other internal data. This makes it impossible to have an all-in-one integration system. ZTrucking is integrated with these third-party ELD companies to collect data like states crossed and milage to, to do IFTA calculations, and report all from one system. This enables carriers to have a complete all-in-one solution to problems associated with it. It also takes away the stress of switching between ZTrucking and ELD companies to perform some of the tasks stated above.
Reports And Export Data
Financial reports can easily be tabled and stored in a database. Having all of your revenue, expenses, dispatching fees, and so on in one system helps to visualize and report your company's finances and financial projections with ease and accuracy. You would then be able to make executive decisions based on these financial reports and data such as:
Financial projection
Vehicle health like mileage and maintenance record
Drivers' violation records, disciplinary data, load counts, etc.
Dispatcher’s load count
Broker load count
Customers / Shippers count (e.g contact for a dedicated lane)
Say goodbye to errors and backlogs of paper data. You can have all these records at the tips of your fingers with ZTrucking.
User-Based Access
User-based access for better handling of sensitive company information and data. Now as your carrier company grows into a bigger organization, hiring different drivers, dispatchers, accountants, safety managers, and so on would cause you to share your data with lots of new employees. This can be managed with user bases where each employee would have access only to particular data necessary in their field.
Growth of Business
Over 70% of carriers go out of business in the first few years. The benefits of automated technological software like ZTrucking are higher productivity, reliability, availability, increased performance, and reduced operating costs.
Moving to an all-in-one system of operations yields a good return on investment (ROI), eliminates human error, improves consistency and accuracy, and identifies errors along the way. The benefits of automated systems can be a powerful motive for increasing service to your end users. Automated systems or software like ZTrucking can make proper carrier route planning and limiting products, thus making their sustainability more efficient. This prevents warehouses from holding products for too long and risking expiry, leading to product waste, or worse, reaching consumers late, and becoming a safety concern. And it is a good way to get very low insurance premiums. ZTrucking is the right move for every carrier company out there.
Conclusion
Using ZTrucking for your carrier company will save you money, time, and viability of your business and enable it to thrive and become more successful. ZTrucking would also allow carrier companies to expand and grow their business by
Recruiting more drivers and handling their records
Performing daily audits on the company's behalf
Automating most tasks which will save more money on hiring employees to perform those tasks and saving time on processing paychecks, invoices, fuel transactions, scheduling recurring expenses and so many more. These tasks can be handled in seconds with ZTrucking automated systems.