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AS1' DOES 111

16th June 2005, Page 52
16th June 2005
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

There's no longer

any reason to take on a trip that doesn't earn you money, thanks to a new piece of software for smaller operators.

Robin Meczes reports.

If there's one thing you need to make a profit in this business, it's a proper idea of your costs. But for many small operators and owner-drivers, working out those costs — and from them the rates you need to charge to make a trip worthwhile — sounds about as easy as correctly predicting next Saturday's winning lottery numbers.

There are, of course, lots of ways to work out your costs. You could use the cost tables published by our sister title, Motor Transport. You could build your own spreadsheet. Or you could even sit down with paper and pen.

But even when you get to your true standing and running costs, it's unlikely to be enough to tell you whether it's worth it, when a new punter is on the phone pressuring you to take a 29-tonne load from Edinburgh to Edenbridge for a monkey.

But if you're willing to invest fifty quid or so in EasyTrucking from DASE Software Designs, your problems should largely be over. This exceptional package not only works out your standing and running costs from information you initially put in, but also calculates your breakeven point per mile and per tonne. It then allows you to input any proposed trip before spelling out exactly what you'll make (or lose) on it, taking into account such intangibles as your expected driver costs during the trip and daily vehicle depreciation.

It will even compare two completely different trips and tell you which one will be the more profitable for you.

If it did no more than this, it would be well worth the asking price. And EasyTrucking is available in this simple Trip Analyser form. But opt for the Full Business Suite and EasyTrucking can do much, much more — from helping you to make initial quotes at a profitable rate to creating invoices; and from keeping track of your fuel expenses to reminding you when vehicles need servicing or an MoT. It will even keep track of your customers, what they owe you and how your turnover and balance sheet are progressing.

Getting started When you start up the software for the first time you will have to spend a hit of time entering information, but it's not a huge amount and shouldn't take too long.

If you've got the basic Trip Analyser it's only your company details (contact information, mostly, plus your liability insurance costs and renewal dates); details of your individual vehicles (make and model, mileage, value, monthly loans and leasing costs, annual insurance premium and renewal date, fuel consumption, and so on); and the current cost of the various fuel types you use.

If you've gone for the Full Business Suite you also get to enter customer information (contact information and payment terms); details of the different kinds of payment you'll accept different types of trip expenses (tolls, food, parking fees, etc); and details of any fuel cards your company uses.

Once you've got this far, you're ready to get to grips with the nuts and bolts of the software.

Using the core of the package — its trip analysing capability—couldn't be much simpler, with just three basic functions to choose from: • Break-even analyser For each vehicle this calculates your daily depreciation costs, daily fixed costs and daily fuel costs, based on the average daily mileage you entered in the vehicle record earlier. From these it produces an average break-even day rate and mileage rate for the vehicle.

• Single trip analyser. First enter the roundtrip mileage for any potential journey, the vehicle you're going to use, the price you've quoted (per tonne or per mile), any likely additional expenses and the time the trip is likely to take.The analyser will then come up with the exact cost of the trip (including daily depreciation costs) and the profit or loss you'll be making.

• Multiple trip analyser This is similar to the single-trip analyser, but with the bonus of allowing you to compare two trips to see which one will make (or lose) you the most.

The trip analyser functions are all easy to use.As long as you've put in accurate costs to start with, it will supply the golden information many truck operators find so hard to work out for themselves in milliseconds.

We used it, for example, to compare two very different trips in a tractor unit — one a shortish 135-mile round trip hauling a trailer with 23 tonnes at a quoted price of just over 111/tonne; the other a 452-mile journey with 28 tonnes which we'd quoted for at 19.80/ tonne. The upshot? Trip one would make us just over £80 but trip two would lose us nearly £100.

Avoiding a single journey of this sort would more than pay for the software.

Obviously, you can also use the single trip analyser to establish a worthwhile rate in the lirst place by repeatedly analysing the journey with different rates until it starts to make financial sense.The only downside with this is that you'll keep having to re-enter all the trip details from the start every time. Once you've entered the trip and load data and analysed it there's no way to go back a screen and alter the rate alone. The Trip Analyser function is invaluable in itself, but if you push the boat out and buy the Full Business Suite you get a variety of other useful business aids to help you run your operation more efficiently.

Once you've entered a customer's basic details the software makes it easy to create quotes, produce order confirmations and send out invoices. Creating quotes is a particular pleasure, because once you've entered details of the job in question, the software asks you what percentage mark-up to put on it, takes into account all the costs involved and automatically produces a quote that ensures you make that percentage.

Could it possibly get any easier to get the maths right? We doubt it.

Producing order confirmations, once your quote has been accepted, is as simple as telling EasyTrucking which quote number to turn into an order, and producing invoices is as simple as telling it which orders to invoice for. Again, it doesn't get much simpler than that.

You can see instant lists of your quotes, orders and invoices: the software even helps you track payments of invoices after they've been created, allowing you to see at a glance which ones are paid, part-paid, due, overdue and written off, with a useful option to export this information in Microsoft Excel format.

EasyTrucking also helps keep you on the straight and narrow in terms of many of your vehicle-related obligations, such as servicing, MoTs and insurance premium renewals, thanks to a basic diary function that will remind you when you are within 15 days of a deadline.

It ain't sophisticated — it just comes up with a simple box when you start up the software that tells you some action is needed and guides you to the reports area where you can produce a list of outstanding tasks. But it gets the job done and is a nice bit of added value, especially given that you can add any other tasks you want to be prompted about to the vehicle-related deadlines it automatically takes care of.

If all this hasn't convinced you to get the Full Business Suite, rather than simple Trip Analyser, it's worth mentioning that it also allows you to enter full records of your fuel,tyre and other trip expenses, making the Trip Analyser function ever more accurate over time.

Splitting hairs

If you're wondering if this all sounds a bit too good to be true, we're delighted to be able to report that it isn't— there were one or two rough edges to our pre-production version of the software we'd like to see smoothed out.

For example, data fields for phone numbers don't allow for London numbers (you can only enter 020 8652 3500 as 02086523500) or mobiles (enter 07890 096688 and it'll knock the initial zero off the second half, for some reason). There's a box set aside under "company information" for your firm's logo (so it can he incorporated on quotes and invoices etc) but there's no way to import the logo. And more seriously,perhaps, we found we couldn't amend the "status" of a task we'd entered in the reminders utility from "due" to "completed".

The good news is that DASE has promised to sort out these glitches by the time you read this.

We were also frustrated to find we couldn't delete certain records once entered— vehicle records, for example — while others,lik e quotes, couldn't be edited once saved (though you've obviously got an option to create a fresh quote).

One last thing that irked us was the way the software demands a value for certain boxes even when it's not applicable. For example, you can't leave driver expenses as zero for a trip in theTrip Analyser — you're obliged to enter expenses of at least a penny.This doesn't affect the outcome much—it's just a niggle.

To be fair we're splitting hairs here, especially given the price of the software.

Overall, we loved Easylirucking. It's a simple, no-nonsense piece of software that we have absolutely no hesitation in recommending to all small operators.

Edinburgh to Edenbridge and back for a monkey? Do yourself a favour —save two pointless days out on the road and use the £.150 you'd have lost on that trip to buy the full version of EasyTrucking instead. •

Tags

People: Robin Meczes
Locations: Edenbridge, Edinburgh, London

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