Salil Prabhakar is a professional accountant who has specialized in the trucking industry for more than a decade. He looks after many clients with trucking companies, all with their own unique ways of doing things. We recently met up with Salil to learn more about what he thinks is the ideal way to run and grow a trucking company.
Q&A
Tell us about yourself and the company.
My name is Salil Prabhakar, and I run an accounting and bookkeeping business called Sun Accounting & Tax Services out of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
I have around 12 years of bookkeeping and accounting experience, specializing in trucking. I was in the trucking industry from 2011 before I started my own business in 2021. I know a lot about trucking.
What is your experience with Axon?
I preach Axon to all my trucking clients if they don’t already have it. This is the way to go.
The company I was working with before chose Axon in 2011, so I started with that from scratch, and we built the whole process. After 10 years, when I left that company, they didn’t even feel that I left. The processes were in place and Axon Software helps the company grow. You have to trust the software and trust the process.
Axon is completely integrated. Nobody can go in and change receivables or payables or do anything. It’s all one central thing. You have to go into the orders, and everything happens from there. The rest is integrated, including the accounting, which is a very neat thing.
With all other software, you have to use QuickBooks or Sage or something. From a trucking perspective, it’s a very neat thing to have the accounting integrated.
How does a year-end process look with Axon compared to using another program?
For ten years, I did year-ends for the company I was with. Let’s say the 31st of December is the year-end. All the files go to the accountant by the 15th or 20th of January, because we do the bank rec. and everything. The rest is all complete and you send it.
With QuickBooks for example, I have to wait for a client to send me all the data. Then I have to put it in QuickBooks and reconcile the bank and update that. It’s time-consuming versus Axon, because with Axon, everything is happening live. There’s no second thing you have to enter.
Do you find that your clients using other software need more staff than the Axon clients?
Yes, they do have more staff than if they use Axon. Besides that, I think when everybody puts data in Axon, it’s way less stressful, right? Once you set up who does the billing, what the dispatchers are doing, what the planners are doing … All the stress you had of making a mistake and billing things wrong – that goes away.
Once you reduce stress, you perform better, and your employees perform better. That’s where I see the most value, compared to hiring or not hiring one extra person. How stressful that whole process is, compared with how stress-free Axon is.
When you worked with your previous company, how much growth did they have?
When we got Axon, we had 14 or 15 trucks. Now they have 40 trucks, but they run around 150 trucks a week because they do a lot of brokerage work. They haven’t increased the staff. Eventually they’ll need to add sales and dispatch and all that, but right now if they double, they still don’t need anything. A stress-free environment.
For two years we were running parallel Excel sheets and comparing it to Axon. But now, that company relies 100% on Axon because the data is accurate. It’s time-saving, stress-free, quick, and has the trucking app. You can send all the emails, attach everything, and invoice with the click of a button. PODs and everything are sent. You can customize it by sending as one PDF or multiple. There are a lot of options, so it’s very nice.
Can you compare the fully integrated accounting of Axon Software with some of the software being used by your other clients?
The main thing other trucking companies who don’t use Axon have is a smaller version of dispatch software. But the data is not accurate. If I’m running a sales report, I am not sure if their data is accurate or not. That’s always a challenge.
So, when we use QuickBooks and go over banking statements and reports from their software, there is always an issue. “My sales are X dollars, but in QuickBooks it’s Y. Why is there a difference?” Then I’ll say, “I have no idea why there is a difference. You tell me.”
I can’t help them find out why there is a difference in sales. I’m not sure if I am getting 100% accurate data or not. I’m relying on whatever I get from the employees or owners. But with Axon, I know it’s correct because everything is integrated.
Does not having Axon expose your customers to audits or anything?
Yes and no. Let’s say an audit came. With Axon, everything being integrated, we can run the reports and the reports will be right. But when I have to run somebody else’s reports with QuickBooks, they’ll be accurate because I am doing the bookkeeping, but if they run reports with their software and compare with QuickBooks, I am not sure if they will match. I have no reliability on that.
Do you find any benefit to Axon being a trucking-specific system?
Well accounting is accounting, whether it’s for a hairdresser or trucking. I don’t see Axon as accounting software or dispatch. It’s a package. You have safety in there, IFTA in there, payroll in there. Financials, dispatch, driver data, everything.
To grow a company, especially a trucking company, you need a full package. It’s a one-stop shop, and if you want to grow, that’s the way you should go.
Other systems have double entry. From an accountant’s point of view, that’s very good because I can bill more hours. With Axon I’m not going to bill more hours because everything is entered. All I have to do is check, and that’s very neat.
In order to grow a trucking company, if your accounting software is not integrated, it’s a huge problem.
If one of your trucking clients asked which software to go with, what would you say?
Well, I preach Axon. They think I’m a sales guy for Axon.
If my client is asking me for advice, or even if they don’t ask and I see the growth they are going through, I say spending $2,000 a month is not a huge thing. If you hire a new person on minimum wage, you spend more than that. With Axon you can spend that, train your staff, and grow your company.
If you miss one invoice or it’s wrongly billed and you can’t track if you have received the money or not, you are just losing that money. One invoice a month can be missed or misallocated.
With Axon, mistakes are next to nothing. You have zero mistakes because you can catch those mistakes if anything is happening.
With other systems, you constantly have to check and check and check. But with integrated software, accounting is integrated with dispatch. That helps us as a bookkeeper or accountant to save time because the data is coming right from the software. We work in the software, so we don’t have to compare and match with something else. That’s huge, because margins in trucking are small, and if you lose that margin, you lose everything.
