Time is incredibly valuable and irreplaceable. That’s why smart business owners invest in technology to save time and get more out of every day.
We spoke with Paul Singh of Quality Freight Line for further details on how two of them use Axon Software to handle the work that would take other businesses four people or more to accomplish.
Q&A
Tell us about yourself and the company.
My name is Paul. I’m with Quality Freight Line from Haymarket, Virginia. We haul all sorts of products, mostly within the northeast area of the US. We do a lot of paper products, Coca Cola products, beer, paper, furniture. You name it, we haul it around this area.
We started using Axon in February of 2018.
How did you get into trucking?
It was my Dad who started it. He was driving for somebody for a few years and wanted to purchase his own truck. He got a partner with him for one truck. He drove that for four or five years, and he got my brother into it as well.
My brother started dispatching and my dad ended up getting a few more guys to work with us, and we started from there. We had about four trucks. Three of them were owner operators. Only one was our own truck. Then we purchased a few new trucks. We moved from six to eight, eight to ten. We had around 12 trucks for almost eight years. Now we’re running around 30 trucks.
I was working in IT myself. We saw the business growing and needed help in the office so I ended up coming in.
We purchased five or six brand new trucks when I came in, and that’s when we decided to get software because it was getting to be a little too much work for us to handle.
As far as keeping the paperwork, we literally had our rate confirmations piled up and I wouldn’t throw them away, because I had no other way to access them. I would go back in the pile and pick each one out.
How has your experience been with Axon?
It’s been great. It’s a lot easier to put in the order, a lot easier to invoice, a lot easier to look up the orders. All I have to do is type in the order number and it just pops up. Whereas before I would go through hundreds of papers to find one thing.
Same thing goes for the proof of deliveries we get from our drivers. We just attach them to the order. We get an email from any of the brokers saying, “Hey, I need this POD” and I just plug in the number. POD pops up and I email it right away.
It’s been really great and helpful. It decreased our work probably about 50 percent. We used to sit there until 5:00 and now we get done with our work about 12:00 or 1:00. The rest of the time we can be productive and do something else.
Has Axon changed the way you do fuel tax?
Yeah. What my dad used to do is put a GPS in each of our trucks. He would take the miles from each GPS, bring them home written on paper, and add them one by one to see the miles we have. Same goes with fuel.
Now, with Axon, I can take out the equipment routing, which tells me exactly which equipment travelled in which states and how many miles. That has made it a lot easier for us.
We get a file from Fleet One, and we can download it to our Axon system, and it applies to whichever truck used whatever fuel.
I used to have to go through Fleet One’s account, plugging it in for each truck, every time they fueled. You can imagine how much work that was for each truck. We were doing it for 10 or 12 trucks. But now we’re running 25 or 30 trucks, so that would be a whole lot more work. We would probably need a few more guys to do that.
How do your drivers like the statements from Axon?
It’s a lot clearer for them. It tells them what the gross for the truck is and what the deductions are. It separates everything for them and it’s a lot more clear and simple. They love it.
Before Axon, we would get a call from drivers saying, “What’s this for, and this, and that?” Now I email them their pay stubs every Saturday and I don’t get calls from anybody because all their questions are answered right there on the statement.
Has Axon helped with invoicing more quickly?
Yes. Before, I had to take out a rate confirmation from a pile of rate confirmations, and then make sure I matched my paperwork, and then scan and email them.
Now, Axon creates the invoice itself and the rate confirmation has already been attached. When I input the orders, all I have to do is select the right bill of lading, proof of delivery, scan it, attach it, and email it straight from Axon. I don’t have to redo the work I was doing already.
Without Axon how many more staff members would you need?
Probably two more, easily. Because one person can only do dispatching work and the other has to handle invoicing by themselves. Then we’d need a separate person to at least do checks at the end of the week and put in all the data. Inputting all the orders, the PODs, fuel, deductions, and remembering to do all that. Because the person booking loads in dispatching is just so tied up; he doesn’t have time to do anything else.
The person doing invoices obviously consumes time by rescanning paperwork and going through piles and so forth. It consumes at least six or seven hours of your day, easily, putting 50 to 60 invoices and rate confirmations into the system. We would definitely need a couple more people to handle this. Yeah.
So Axon probably saves us, I would say, $80,000 to $90,000 per year which we would have spent on a couple of extra employees.
We definitely save about four or five hours in a day, per person, by using Axon. Whatever work we were doing with 10 trucks, we are now doing about 50 percent less work and running three times more trucks.
Workload has gone down 50 to 60 percent, even though we have grown from 10 to 30. The two of us could run almost 60 to 70 trucks by ourselves. Work has definitely decreased because of Axon.
We are actually planning on adding at least 5 or 6 more trucks next year, and we don’t have any plans of stopping. Axon is going to be there with us.
The main reason we are growing as quickly as we are is because of Axon. It’s saving us a lot of time. Then, since we have extra time in a day, why not have a few more trucks and keep us a little bit more busy, instead of wasting the day not doing anything.
If somebody in your industry asked about your experience with Axon, what would you say?
It’s been great. I actually referred Axon to a few of our friends who have similar companies to us when they saw that it’s only two of us handling that much business.
There are a few companies that have about the same business that we have, and they have three extra people working. I know that person is paying $3,000 to $3,500 per person to handle all the paperwork we are handling with two of us.
He reached out to us saying, “How are you guys doing this?” Well, we have software called Axon and you should give them a call.
He is really tied up because he is by himself on the dispatching side, and handling his employees, and so forth. But he really liked the idea, and the way Axon works, and he is probably going to end up coming to Axon as well.
