Trucking software revisited
 

I just finished reading a post in this section about trucker (o/o) software and just wanted to see if there's anything else out there. One things for sure, none of the programs I tried are laid out in a logical fashion. I'm not sure which is worst or which is best simply because they don't seem logical to me.

Here are the ones I've tried so far:

Truckin Pro 7 http://www.foglinesoftware.com/ (this is the closest to what I'm wanting)
Truckers Helper http://www.truckershelper.com/
Easy Trucker http://www.2omni.com/

I'd like to see something that could also handle a checking account. Maybe not as full blown as Quicken/Quickbooks, but at least the bare essentials of it.

Anyone know of any other programs worth trying out?

Load Profit Analysis software from Tim Brady:

http://writeuptheroad.com/load_profit_analysis1.htm

Excellent software for calculating your cost per mile and cost per day, as well as very easy software for figuring out if a load is profitable. Does not work on Vista though.

Tim Brady is a far better businessman than Kevin Rutherford could ever hope to be, but doesn't have the charisma of dear old Kevin.

I'm old skool.....

Quickbooks Pro w/Payroll

and MS Excel

Arghhhh - I hate programs that don't offer demo's. I couldn't try it out at home this week anyway - every computer at home has Vista. The only XP machine I have is my laptop, and it's in the shop.

I've got Quicken Home & Business which I'm trying to figure out the best way to do the load info into it.

I also have the Excel worksheet I've been using for tracking the data.

Now, if someone could come up with a good solution that combines them for me ;-)

I have spoken to a couple of owners who use Quickbooks Pro. I believe you can import data from Excel into that program. You may want to check if that is what you want to do.

Unfortunately, I have not found an industry specific program that will do everything that I would like. Many of the programs have everything but one or two things that I would like to have in my software. A friend of mine recently purchased Trucknpro from Foglinessoftware. He has put about half of his loads in for this year. So far he really likes it. That program works well for the owner operator who drives his own truck. It will track expenses, revenue and the basic accounting numbers. I like the broker or agent part where you can put in your broker information and make notes. I use that a lot to keep track of brokers and shippers with whom I do business. I would think that they will incorporate some of the other features into the program at some point. He always seems to continue improving the program.

Quick Books Pro is supposed to have a way to customize part of the program for specific industries. I would like to check it out for the trucking industry to see how well it would work. The nice feature with most of the industry specific programs is that they do a much better job of tracking trucking related expenses. It may work for you to do most of your accounting in one of the programs and continue keeping your checkbook with something else. It would be much better to have everything in one package.

One thing I have found on Quickbooks (which is what I use) is you can break things down by "class". So each asset can have it's own class (which is just the asset number). So when I do invoicing or add fuel etc, I choose the truck number from the class drop down box and it will sort the profit and revenue by truck.

For my friends trucks we went with http://www.boltsystem.com which is an online dispatch software. It is pretty good with fleet management. You can evaluate a lot of different things like lane profitability, truck, driver profitablitly etc.

They do requre a 7 truck minimum or least to pay for 7 trucks which comes out to about $150 a month.

I'd rather do the bookkeeping through either Quickbooks or Quicken Home & Business. The only thing bad with those two are that they don't have any way of doing the numbers to show you your per mile income/expenses.

Trucknpro is nice with the way it keeps everything on a per-trip basis, but at the moment it doesn't have any reports to give you mileage breakdowns (per week, month, etc), which I'll need for easily transferring funds into the maintenance account.

Truckers Helper is just too confusing on the data entry. I've tried entering trips, but it just seems strange to me.

I wrote Fogline Software and he said that they're going to be doing some updates after the first of the year and will try to get some mileage reports (not fuel mileage) into the program.

Then there's entering the data into the bookkeeping software. I've only tried entering a couple trips right now. Just have to get a system in place that'll work for me.

I would be interested in knowing the type of mileage reports he is talking about.



Sometimes you just need to try different software to find the one that best suits your needs.