Your back office opens at nine at night, because that is when you sit down at it.
Dispatch keeps the truck loaded. The back office keeps the company alive: the books, the invoices, the filings, the driver files, the email, and a monthly review where somebody hands you the numbers and tells you what they mean. It runs during business hours, staffed by people who do this all day.
Back office work does not shrink because you only have one truck.
There is no such thing as a one twelfth IFTA return. A quarterly filing takes the same afternoon whether you run one truck or ten, so the small carrier does it after the truck stops, using the most expensive labor in the company: the owner's.
Not one of those hours is billable to anybody. Put a number on your own hour in the calculator and you have priced your evenings for the first time.
Six departments. One invoice.
Books and money
- ·Bookkeeping reconciled monthly*
- ·Invoicing within one business day of delivery
- ·Accounts receivable follow up, by broker and by age
- ·Accounts payable calendar, fuel, insurance, notes, tolls
- ·Cost per mile maintained from your real numbers
* If your books are not current when you come on, bringing them current is a cleanup engagement quoted separately from the monthly fee. You see the number before any of that work starts.
Compliance calendar
- ·MCS-150, UCR, IFTA, IRP, Form 2290, tracked and filed
- ·Medical certificate and CDL expiration, watched ahead
- ·Annual inspection scheduling per unit
- ·Random testing pool and Clearinghouse queries
- ·Driver qualification files built and maintained
Document control
- ·Load files complete: rate confirmation, bill of lading, proof of delivery, receipts
- ·Retention clocks honored per record type
- ·Maintenance history per unit
- ·Accident register kept whether or not a claim was filed
- ·Audit ready folder, assembled before it is asked for
Technology
- ·Isolated TMS tenant, one per carrier, never pooled
- ·ELD provisioning and managed tablets
- ·Email, files, and calendar on your own domain
- ·Multi factor authentication and device management
- ·Document storage with a folder structure that survives an audit
Insurance and vendor administration
- ·Certificate of insurance requests, out the same day
- ·Renewal calendar with the 35 day cancellation window watched
- ·Claims paperwork assembled and tracked
- ·Broker packets and carrier setups maintained
- ·Vendor accounts documented so they are not in one person's phone
The monthly review
- ·Revenue, cost per mile, and margin per truck
- ·Deadhead percentage and revenue per loaded mile
- ·Accessorials billed against accessorials collected
- ·Receivables aging and cash position
- ·What we recommend changing next month, in writing
Who you still need. Your CPA signs the return. Your attorney reads the contract. Your agent binds the coverage. We keep the books they work from, the files they ask for, and the dates that tell you when to pick up the phone to one of them.
If you do not have them yet, we will help you find them. We keep working relationships with credentialed people who understand trucking, and we will make the introductions rather than hand you a search engine. Once you have them, we can give each one access to the office so they work directly in your file instead of waiting on you to email a document. You decide who gets access and what they can see, and you can revoke it at any time.
Your customer list is not our asset.
One tenant per carrier
Every carrier gets an isolated tenant in the TMS. Your rate confirmations are not visible to another carrier's dispatcher, and your documents do not live in a folder named after somebody else's company. The day you leave, your tenant exports and closes, and you walk out with the file.
No pooled freight, ever
A load booked in your name runs on your truck. There is no internal board and no allocation between clients, so there is no other carrier in this building who can take freight that was already yours.
The office runs whether you hauled four loads or forty.
| Component | Basis | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Back office, company | Monthly | $1,100 |
| Per active truck | Monthly | $300 |
| Per active driver | Monthly | $100 |
| Technology, additional driver | Per month | $35 |
| Onboarding | One time | $4,000 |
| Onboarding, spread | 12 monthly | $400 |
Active means a truck or driver that was dispatched or on duty during the billing month. Full definitions and a worked twelve month total are on the pricing page.
A bookkeeping clerk in Texas averages $46,520 a year in wages alone, before payroll tax, benefits, an office, and software. Nobody hires a third of a person, so the third is what we sell. The day a full time hire costs you less than we do, we will say so and help you hand it over.
Texas annual mean wage, bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks, from BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2023. Side by side with our twelve month total on the pricing page.
Tell us the truck count and the driver count and you will have the monthly number before the call ends.