Your a Maryland Meathead.....lol

I had to do this for my first job. We had a trip sheet. Whenever you crossed state lines you put exit miles. Next state line you put exit miles. I kept the thing on the passenger seat with my logbook. At the end of the day you just carried the ending miles for each state to the beginning for the next, wrote in beginning and ending miles, total the whole thing for each state and, Voila you have the ifta mileage done. Took about five minutes at the end of each day. The secretary who did the ifta then just used the fuel receipts to figure the taxes. This way it wasn't a mountain of work at the end of each quarter.

I prefer the method of using company fuel card and letting the qual com thingy figure the whole thing for you.

One of these days soon the GPS manufactures will incorporate a tracking system just for IFTA which will produce a coma separated file that will easily be downloaded and imported into a spreadsheet. They already have all the data, they just need to output it to a file and offer a few simple commands for the user to reset and other small items.

http://www.driversdailylog.com/ddlwhatelsedoesddldo.htm

Qualcomm makes a unit which uses GPS that will do your fuel taxes for you. It is a smaller handheld unit. In essence, you put in the gallons purchased and it tracks your truck and records all miles in each state. At the end of the quarter they send you a fuel tax report and you mail in a check to your state. The device costs about $1,600 and $45/month. I can seem the advantage of using something such as this.

I'm using a trip sheet, which is required in Texas, and you just put in the odometer reading at the beginning and end of the trip, and every time you cross a state line.

I'm also using Truckbytes, which has a trip report in it as well, and you can print reports.

It's no big deal really, but I would hate to have to go back and figure it out later.

jonboy

my company does it all through the satellite, although they did not use any type of "addon" device.

I know it cost them around $10,000. Well worth it for 400 trucks.

We keep track of our miles with a standard trip report sheet printed by our company. All our fuel is purchased with a comdata credit card (http://www.comdata.com). At the end of each quarter, we get our fuel reports from comdata and aggregate our miles in Excel. Then we use an online tool (http://www.iftaplus.com) to calculate our taxes and generate our state forms. The most painful thing for us is to keep track of our miles. The rest is easy.

When our drivers come in from the road to do their settlements, I have them give me their final odometer reading. Since they also did this on their previous trip, I now know their total miles for the trip.

Then, on the back of their driver settlement, I list each leg of their trip by zip code. The first leg is a deadhead from terminal to pickup; so I write down those zips and from truckmiles.com it tells me how many miles between these two zips and how many miles in each state between these two zips (you do have to do some adding up for turns in each state).

The second leg is from the pickup zip to destination zip, third leg is deadhead from destination to next pickup, etc, etc, etc, until final leg is deadhead from final destination to terminal.

Then I total up all miles for all states and the grand total and compare it to the actual miles driven for the trip from the odometer readings. There is always some overage from the odometers so I allocate these miles across the states based on their relative percentage of the total. I used to allocate all the overage to the home state, which is easier, but probably less accurate.

We use quickbooks pro for our accounting needs, so when I enter an invoice I break it down into line items for the miles driven in each state. I have sales items for miles traveled in each state, such as AL MILES, GA MILES, FL MILES, etc. So each invoice may have several entries; however when I print the invoice I can suppress the line items and show only a total for the broker. I divide the flat rate for the load across the total miles to get the rate per mile, which is the same for each state.

For the deadhead miles, I enter an invoice with the customer as 'DEADHEAD' and show the miles for each state. (I have to enter the sale as $.01 as it will not report zero sales on my reports.)

This way I can print out reports at the end of the quarter showing miles driven in all states.

For fuel purchases, I do something similar. Instead of just assigning them to a fuel expense account, I have items set up for each state: GA GALLONS, AL GALLONS, FL GALLONS, etc.

I realize that this is not practical for most of you, but since I have to enter all this stuff in quickbooks anyway (invoices and fuel purchases) I set it up so that I just enter this once for each trip and track IFTA this way. Its relatively simple at the end of the quarter to extract the info I need from qb. It also gives me average rate per mile, ratio of loaded miles to deadhead, etc.

Some would argue that this is not as accurate as the drivers writing down their numbers at each border, and I would agree. However, most of the time a driver will forget to do it at least once on each trip which would force me to recreate the trip on paper anyway. And the zips are readily available to me from the BOLs turned in at each settlement.

Discovering truckmiles.com, which is free, was the key to making this system time effective for me.

BTW, even if you don't do your own bookkeeping, I recommend that each of you do a driver settlement statement at the end of each trip. You don't need any special forms, I just use blank paper. At the top I write the driver's name and the dates he was out, and also his ending odometer. Down the left side of the page I list all his loads and what they paid. Then I total that and calculate his percentage. Down the right side I list all expenses, grouped together. If there are any out of pocket business expenses, like scale fees, I add them to the drivers pay. At the bottom of the page I do a summary, showing total revenue less driver pay less expenses which leaves an operating profit (or loss) for the trip. (Its best to fill up the truck with fuel at the end of each trip so that fuel expense accurately reflects what was used for the week).

Of course, this does not reflect any fixed charges for the truck such as insurance, plates, taxes, equipment payments, etc., but it is a great little snapshot of how each truck is doing. If a truck/driver is not turning an operating profit its best to find out right away and address it than waiting for month end, or quarterly, profit and loss statements.

My .02 worth...

Since I'm an Internet Truckstop subscriber, I use their Fuel Tax Online. It works like a charm. I take the trip sheet information and enter it online.