The Importance of Trucking Bookkeeping: What You Need to Know

In 2018, commercial trucks paid $18 billion in federal highway-user taxes and $27.7 billion in state highway-user taxes. Yet, these aren’t the only taxes or expenses that truckers have to pay each year.

Because the trucking industry sees a lot of cash flow and business operations, it’s essential to start trucking bookkeeping from the beginning.

Wondering why it’s so crucial that your business has a bookkeeping strategy? Read on to learn the importance.

Keeps You Up to Date

Trucking bookkeeping is important because it can help you stay up to date on all of your records. If you don’t maintain your books at least once per week, bookkeeping will be a much harder process.

When you stay up to date on bookkeeping for a trucking company, you can understand your current business financial situation. This makes all short-term and long-term business decisions much easier to plan out.

Keeps You on Track

Bookkeeping for truck drivers can keep the business on track with financial records. A trucking company should always note where payments came from and what they were for.

Keeping a record allows you to know who needs to pay for something and when. You’ll find that searching for invoices is much easier this way.

Hiring a trucking CPA that uses a bookkeeping software program can help the automatic tracking of payments and expenses.

Automatic Expense Tracking

Bookkeeping services are much easier to handle if you open a checking account for the business. There are accounting services out there that will work with your bank and credit card accounts.

Whenever a payment is made, you won’t have to manually enter the information yourself saving a lot of time. It also helps avoid the common problem of human error.

Access to Key Metrics

Staying up to date with your trucking bookkeeping can provide you access to key metrics about how the business is performing. The most important metric to know and understand is the average cost per mile.

You can calculate this metric yourself or use tools that will accurately do it for you. All metrics will be extremely important in the decision-making process and can help you cut back on costs where needed.

Depending on the bookkeeping software you use, you might find some or all of these metrics included:

• Revenue totals
• Expenditure totals
• Profit/loss
• Cost per mile
• Days sales outstanding (DSO)
• Accounts receivable and payable
• Revenue yield
• Cost of maintenance
• Freight cost per unit
• Average and total salaries
• Debt ratios

You’ll want to choose a bookkeeping software that is specifically designed to manage a transport business for best results. If you choose not to use software, you’ll still need to figure out these key metrics to succeed in the field.

Do You Need Trucking Bookkeeping?

No matter how short or long you’ve been in the business, a good process for trucking bookkeeping is necessary. Without bookkeeping, you won’t be able to accurately track profit and expenses among other key metrics.

To make things easier on your business, you can opt for a trucking CPA or download one of the many trucking tools out there. The choice is yours, but the decision must include a bookkeeping strategy.

Once you get this part of your company down, check out this website for more great business advice.