If you own a trucking company or manage bookkeeping for one, then you already know how tricky it can get. Besides managing the daily tasks of your trucking business, staying updated with your back-office tasks is also equally important. If neglected initially, backlogs pile up and clearing it becomes extremely difficult. Regular trucking bookkeeping helps to keep a track of all your day-to-day trucking activities and transactions up to date. Bookkeeping is often confusing and can get tedious even if small entries are missed. Most businesses turn to external vendors to manage their accounts and ensure efficient bookkeeping.
By keeping a track of your income tax data, analysing your maintenance schedules, estimating monthly profitability and warranty details you will be able to efficiently manage your trucking accounts. However, this is easier said than done. Managing daily operations and keeping your back-office records updated can often get intimidating. Today, there are numerous bookkeeping tools and software to manage trucking bookkeeping. While the tools make accounting simpler, it is essential to know which tools can serve your purpose. Paperwork and other documents are needed to make the most of your tools. Without appropriate paperwork, tools and software throw errors, which further complicate your bookkeeping.
So, how can you mitigate these risks and ensure that your truck transport business remains profitable? We have put together a few tips to level up your trucking bookkeeping game!
Tips to Simplify Your Trucking Bookkeeping
Whether you manage trucking bookkeeping on your own or leverage trucking accounting services from a professional, these tips are sure to help you.
- Keep Your Accounts Updated
Keeping your business accounts updated is critical no matter which industry sector belong to. Although this is a basic step, it is even more important for trucking businesses. This is because once you start accumulating backlog, clearing it can get extremely time consuming. Once you start keeping your records updated, you will be surprised to know how simple it gets to manage your trucking accounts. The best way is to maintain the books every day to avoid amassing burdensome piles of unorganized data. Updating accounts regularly helps you log the deductions, which prevents categorising expenses incorrectly. This provides a clear picture of your financial situation and helps you identify steps to improve your overall profits.
- Maintaining Audit-Proof Records
Trucking bookkeeping requires businesses to maintain finances that are audit proof. This is because getting your business expenses and accounts verified regularly helps you to easily mitigate tax-related complications. Saving every receipt and carefully categorizing each of these for all the transactions makes bookkeeping simpler. Most of the accounting services scan the receipts to create e-copies to prevent the loss of critical data. Whether you manage your trucking bookkeeping or leverage external help, it is important for you to accurately record every small business expense.
- Keep An Exclusive Business Credit/Debit Card
Using personal debit or credit card for business transactions is one of the biggest mistakes that even experienced trucking business owners often do. This can get particularly overwhelming when you try to segregate your business expenses from your personal expenses. When you separately keep a card only for your business transactions, you will have all the details of even the minor business-related expenses. As all these transactions interface directly with your bank accounts and statements, you can forego the tedious step of data entry.
- Create an Accounting Chart
This tip is particularly important if you are self-employed. Accounting chart can be created by logging in all the details such as cost of the truck, expense per mile and taxes paid. Generally, accounting charts are created at the end of the financial year. Accurate charts keep the company afloat. So, it is important to track indirect costs that impact all your income and expense elements. Including account numbers helps to organize your charts better and makes it easy for future references.
- Review Your Checks Carefully
No matter how well you know your business partners and stakeholders, when you review the bank checks, cancelled checks, it is critical to ensure that they were issued only for authorised expenditures. Next, it is important to ensure that your sign is always legible and clear. This prevents the risk of forgery. Overall, never letting your guard down and ensuring even the smallest details are accurate helps you to prevent fraud.
- Choose the Right Bookkeeping Tools
While the idea of leveraging tools and software to maintain your trucking bookkeeping sounds promising, it is important to use the right tools. Specific software such as Transportation Management System (TMS) are precisely designed to manage accounts of transport businesses. These tools have special accounting software to manage complex and lengthy transport business operations by tracking total revenue, cost per mile, maintenance cost, salaries, debt ratios, Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), etc.
Summing Up
Whether you plan to manage your trucking accounts on your own or leverage an accounting and bookkeeping partner, these tips help you stay ahead of the curve. Following these simple steps make phenomenal difference and serve as a catalyst to boost your profits.
