FuelTaxOnline: What's Available in Reports
Starting this fall, MTI Customers can now subscribe to MTI Fuel Tax Online, an easier way to generate their fuel tax reports.
Each report can be run for all or individual trucks and can be sent to HTML or Excel spreadsheets for easy reviewing (Except for the state reports - which always go out in PDF)
A question we often get is what reports are available. Well here's a brief list:
Internal Reports
Fuel and Mile Tax Summary Totals Broken down by jurisdiction
IRP Summary Totals for renewals of apportioned plates
Individual State/Province Summary (Totals broken down by truck/unit )
MPG / KPL Report Total Miles/Kilm., Fuel and MPG/KPL by Truck/Unit
Reefer Report
SSR Report
Equipment List Report
IFTA Tax Rates
Mile Tax Rates
Fuel Report
IFTA and Mile Tax Returns
Generic IFTA Summary Totals broken down by jurisdiction
Original Base State or Province IFTA Return
Mile Tax Return by State
All Forms Base state or province IFTA Return and all Mile Tax Returns
Trip Error Reports
Fuel In States with No Miles
Odometer Gaps Between Trips
State Adjacency Gaps Between Trips
State Adjacency Gaps Within Trips
Trips Without Fuel
Gaps Between Trips Longer Than (In Days)
Vehicles with MPG Out of Range: MPG Less Than or Greater than
Interesting commentary on the math between RFID.
The actual article is from RFID Journal so expect it to be a bit biased but still here's the
direct link as well.
The argument:
Suppose you can reduce your empty-equipment inventory and push utilization from 50 percent to 60 percent. Wouldn't you save a pocketful of money? In the case of a chassis, an increase in annual utilization from 50 percent to 60 percent is a reduction in cost of 35 days, or about $300 per year. You can buy a lot of RFID tags and computer systems for $300 per chassis.
Over 235 customers and partners representing more than 100 companies attended the third annaul PeopleNet Conference. Pictured here are John Williams from Tidewater Transit and Rhonda Mahley from Carolina Tank Lines, two of Melton Technologies customers who have chosen PeopleNet as their mobile communication partner. Other MTI customers who attended are Hugh White from Tidewater Transit, Greg Langford from Langford Inc. and Tim Gehring from Pitt Ohio/ECM.
The theme of this years conference was "Drive for ROI". Trucking companies reported that their customers are requiring more real-time data regarding the status of their loads. A drawing for a trip for two to the Masters was given away at this years conference for participating in an ROI write up of your company.
Lana Batts was a featured guest speaker. Lana spoke about Uncertainty and Profit. "Fleets face unparalleled change and uncertainty. Fuel prices will remain high. Driver shortage is here to stay. Roads will remain congested and we'll see more tolls. And environmental regs will cost more while security measures will tighten. The future belongs to fleets that have a good business model, hire the right staff, know their costs and price accordingly, and use technology intelligently."
Melton Technologies provides integration to PeopleNet mobile communication. For further information on PeopleNet visit
www.peoplenetonline.com.
Want to see how Horizon can be applied to different
industries?
Look no further than this brief video:
Horizon in the Logging Industry
This clip discusses different ways that a niche industry such as the Logging Trucking Company (or Timber as was the case with Log creek Timber) can make effective use of the Horizon Trucking software.
We just published three new videos on how to use Horizon Settlements, the pay and expense portion of the Horizon Trucking software family. These short (under 5 minute) clips include basic driver pay, deductions (including regular deductions) and printing of Settlement sheets and Outstanding pay.
There's more coming but I wanted to ensure that if you or any one you know wants some refresher training or just wants to see how things work, here's the link -
Horizon Trucking Software - Settlements Training
Finally converted a meeting that Scott and I had with Reg Williams of
Log Creek Timber into video - the result? How you can use Horizon Dispatch in the logging industry.
The video discusses a number of different ideas and really showcases some of the other features found in Horizon Dispatch and the Customizer, including how the Quick Dispatch screen can show a variety of options and the Booking screen's Custom Label service, that allows objects to be moved around on the screen.
The timber industry is fairly distinct in the trucking industry - pickup locations are not really shippers - rather they are locations in the forest or woodland where the logs are being harvested. And each lot of land is owned by an owner who has contracts with individual mills. Thus part of the challenge in entering loads is to ensure that the trucking software does not allow users to book pickups from one site and go to another site where there is no contract in place.
You may have been noticing that we have a lot more training videos on the
training page - but this one is rather unique, as it is specific to a particular industry. Since there are a number of industries that benefit from the Horizon fleet management software, we'll likely be adding these to the
Industries page rather than the training page.
If you have a trucking industry niche that you feel would be a challenge for the Horizon trucking software, shoot us a line - we'll be happy to show you how we're up to the challenge.
Many of our customers are hearing about Horizon Imaging with Docubase, our one-stop solution for document scanning and imaging. Since we already had our initial Horizon Imaging tool, we thought it would be useful to show why the new Horizon Imaging offering works so well by including it in one of our videos.
Combining document scanning with trucking software can be tricky to do - that's why we've teamed up with
Docubase, the leader in document scanning. With their document scanning solution, Bills of lading can be automatically recognized and linked to shipments and invoices and the one-click approach to pulling up images is as easy to use as a single click.
Now customers who already have a document imaging solution don't need to upgrade if they don't want to. The original Horizon imaging works just fine - but the DocuBase solution does offer some cool features - check out the video to see what I mean.
Check it out here:
Horizon Imaging with Docubase
Melody Latimer is at the PeopleNet User conference and is showing both PeopleNet and customers how Horizon works with it. I did up a little video a while back and I've got some more coming.
The last post I did on our new
trucking technology web site had some video glitches - so I'm posting some new changes later today.
Once again, the keynote presentation was given by Lana Batts, managing partner at
Transport Capital - all about Change, Uncertainty and profits.
So what changes are a given?
1. Fuel Prices remaining high.
2. Driver shortage isn't going away
3. Roads are getting more congested
4. Toll usage will expand
5. Regulations are going to tighten and cost more.
So how do you deal with this?
1. Carriers Need to be creative.
You need to charge surcharges for empty miles and repositioning. Hey - have you started using Billing Surcharges? They can make this process super easy. In fact, I'm going to see how we can add an option to automatically add an empty mile surcharge option.
2. Driver Shortages
Wages must go up, operations must change and life style must improve.
See our profile with
LJ Rogers to find out how a company with a focus on driver productivity is a good thing.
3 and 4 - Road Congestion and Toll usage
Solution? Better routing and optimization. We have links with
IDSC that can help ensure your trucks are hitting the right spots for fuel optimization but with road congestion, that optimization is going to have to be in REAL TIME.
5. Regulations
Route Monitoring. Trucking Monitoring. Driver Monitoring.
With tools
Circle of Service and
PeopleNet, but we link with a variety of
other tools as well, including trailer tracking and with our RFID partner,
Primary Tracking.
A great deal of the keynote was about tracking costs and the right technology. Looks like a great presentation - we'll be posting some more highlights from the PeopleNet conference as we hear back from Melody.
What can we do to help track costs better for you?
Are there costs we aren't tracking today that need to be?
PeopleNet User Conference
I keep hearing that Wal-Mart is dropping its RFID requirement but funny thing is - no one is writing about it.
Overheard at the
PeopleNet conference and in the industry but none of the tech web sites seem to be picking up on this.
walmart dropping rfid?
Some Minor Updates to Horizon Just Posted
Just saw that some new updates were posted for Horizon Billing and Driver Hours late yesterday. To ensure you have the most recent version, be sure to run your Horizon Installation Manager and choose Check for Updates.
Two of the updates deal with the way Billing updates miles and processes invoices to ensure the correct order is retained.
A new feature however has been added to Driver Hours that lets you reset the 34 hour rule. You can do this in the Driver Hours service properties (found under the Tools Services menu). When this is checked, the # of on duty hours for a driver will be reset when he or she has no time logged against them for 2 days or more.
