Kevin Rutherford Profit Gauges?

There is another service out there. basically how it works is you scan and e-mail them your reciepts/invoices and they do the data entry into their software and voila you're done. Problem for me, as I recall was;
1. You have to buy their software which may not be the software that your accountant uses.
2. In the time it takes to scan and e-mail, I could do the data entry into simply accounting myself.

 

Yeah, kinda - but it does some sorting behind the scenes with the categories to throw the figures in the right places for the tax report.

 

When I created my Excel spread sheet, I used the same headings as what's on the gov't tax form so I could just copy the numbers from the spread sheet onto the tax form at tax time.

 

Yeah I don't envy anyone having to keep tabs on multiple units. You know in Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold gets his Christmas lights out to decorate the house and it's this big huge rolled up ball of wires and lights? That's what I think about when I think about keeping tabs on a half dozen trucks, lol.

 

Yeah this is what comes to mind

 

I've been using profit gauges for a few years now. I used to file receipts by the month and then enter them into my excel spread sheet. My problem was that I was always tweaking the spread sheet. I seemed over complicate the process. Like RC said, once you figure it out it isn't bad. It was designed for the one truck o/o leased to a carrier but you can probably make it work for your situation.

Kevin categorizes receipts using the IRS's categories, then by the months within the categories using a 21 pocket folder. You label each pocket in the folder with a category. Throughout the month you put each receipt in a category. At the end of the month, go through each category and add up any receipts in the pocket with an adding machine that will print the total amount of the receipts and then staple that with the receipts, enter into profit gauges and then put it back into the pocket.

In theory, the categories are supposed to line up with the IRS in case of an audit. That way you can go down the line with the auditor and the totals should match up.

 

I use it, it's very easy and gives you a good reporting system. My big complaint is after you enter receipts, it's place in a group, you can't look back at individual receipts or edit them. I've worked with many accounting programs over the years, always able to verify/edit data. The work around is to use a spreadsheet to manage receipts, then enter each category total from the spreadsheet each month into profit gauges.

 

I buy the folders at walmart or office depot.

You may want to look at trucklogics.com and see if their program may work better for you. It is cheaper and offers more. I think that they are affiliated with expresstrucktax. I looked into it a year or two ago when I was thinking of adding trucks.

 

Pull up Trucking Pro Biz, they give a free 10-15 day training tutorial, you download the real thing and try it out, then after x amount of days you can say no or pay them and they activate it. The neat thing about it during the free trial, you can put in your real numbers, when they activate it all your numbers are still there.