Bookkeeping Management News

For Owner Operator Truckers

 

 

How to Manage your business Like a Pro

 

If you operate and earn incomes on a monthly basis, from trucking, you should want to see a monthly snap shot of how you are doing

why not?

you should know your operating cost and profit numbers.

This way, when you talk with other truckers, you can compare how well they are doing base on, income per mile, cost per mile and how much profit the are making per mile, instead of comparing their paid run-rate.  

 You need to have this type of information on your phone to give you a quick overview when required to know, "How did you Do This Month"

If you receive a broker statement each month, you need to know if the gross income minus the yard-expense deductions balanced to the net pay deposited into your account.

Some Truckers are so busy driving, maintaining their truck, and keeping up with the regulatory paperwork, they have no idea how they did how they are doing at the bottom-line.

Their leave this up to the once per-year visit to an accountant.

This is too late.

Your business earn and spend monthly Trucking for Profit, so you need to have a service or system that feeds you this type of information at the end of each bookkeeping month, instead of at tax time when your accountant tells you how much you have to pay in taxes.

Most truckers assume that their accountant is taking care of this function.

Lets be real, you know that accountants do not know your business. They know the numbers and all about doing your taxes.  But they do not know your business. 

So you should not delegate this important business management task to an accountant to only get information at the business year end, when it is time to do the tax filings. 

At that time the best the accountant can do, is tell you how much tax you will have to pay.

That's like closing the gate after all the cows have left.

Here are you minimum business information you need each month:

→ You will need a monthly operating result financial report (P&L)

→ You need a broker statement audit report on your phone so you can take a quick
      look when time permits, at a truck-stop, during DOT rest time in the bunker

→ You will need a monthly operating analysis to give you some meaningful number

► Income earned per mile

► Profit per mile at the bottom-line

► Operating cost per mile/kilometer

► Pre-tax Profit per mile/kilometer

 → You need to have access to a quarterly operating statement which is the merging
       of the monthly statements, designed for quarterly tax compliance filings.

You need an annual Trucking for Profit, Tax Planning Check-up.

At your business third quarter, you need and should have a third quarter operating result statement of your business performance for the year-to-date and a year-end projection of what your potential tax payable could be unless things change.

Some changes can be outside of your control, however, the things this report help you do, is schedule or delay trucking expenses based on projected must do expenses and scheduling these to better manage the potential tax result.

More to come.

TO BE CONTINUED

Hop you had a great Christmas.  However, now is the time to start planning for the kind of results you want to have at the bottom-line in 2020.

Best wishes and success for 2020