“WITH AXON, WE COULD DOUBLE OUR FLEET WITHOUT HIRING ANY EMPLOYEES.”
“We Can Grow Without Stress.”
On a trip over to British Columbia, we stopped in at Canyon Freightways – an Axon Software client of about 3 years that has recently had a great deal of growth and success. We spoke to Sim, who went into detail about the improvements they’ve made to order planning, dispatch, invoicing, payroll, driver settlements, and more.
Our specialty is flat-deck shipping across Western Canada. We started using Axon in August 2016. There was a big need, especially when it came down to administration, tracking all our orders, our expenses, everything pretty much from end to end in the business.
Ever since we’ve been using Axon, we have saved hundreds of hours over the last couple of years. Whenever we are dealing with administration such as statements, or dealing with receivables and payables, it’s just been phenomenal for us to keep track of all the money coming in and money going out. Since we’ve had Axon, we have been able to double our fleet and we haven’t hired any employees. We love Axon.
My experience has been amazing. Not only for myself, but also dispatch. Whenever they want to track orders, track whether specific drivers are available or not, it’s very easy to do that. We’re able to figure out how to be cost effective when it comes to our expenses, especially with fuel, but with our day-to-day expenses as well.
It has been a great, phenomenal program, especially for my accounting team who can’t speak highly enough of it. They are just so happy, and they have been able promote the program to their clients as well, who are using different programs such as QuickBooks or other trucking software. They feel that Axon is just phenomenal.
I am Sim Sandhu, from Canyon Freightways. We’ve been in business for over 30 years, located in Surrey, BC.
To be honest with you, we have cut down hundreds of hours. When getting all the expenses that will be deducted from their statements, we input it. Or even recurring expenses, it’s very easy and we don’t have to keep putting it in. It’s there. It’s deducted every single month. When it comes to the repair bills or any of that, it’s easily trackable.
Fuel tax as well – we get it done really quickly. Mileage is there. Our fuel reports are there and all we do is click a button to file it. That’s it. The best part with Axon is that you’re able to import the fuel bills from, for example, Husky’s online website. Once you import it and the mileage is in the system from the orders, we pretty much merge those two together and that’s it. It’s pretty much done. It has saved us a lot of time and a lot of headache.
Amazing, amazing. Honestly, it’s just a click of a button. Back in the day when we used to use QuickBooks, it was very old school. Once we started with Axon, we’ve been able to do our invoices within half the time.
Say it would take us two or three days to finish our invoicing before, we’re now able to get that done in four or five hours. We’re talking about hundreds of orders that we’re processing throughout the month.
Simple. Whenever we do monthly payroll remittance, it pretty much calculates all your income tax, your CRP, your EI. When you’re doing payroll remittances, literally just a click of a button and you’re done. Before, it was manual, calculating everything by hand, writing it down, having an Excel sheet. Now it’s very simple for us and we get it done within minutes.
They love their statements. They’re really easy to read, and the great thing is they’re categorized. You’re dealing with repair bills, you’re dealing with any of their miscellaneous expenses, and you’re dealing with their income as well – all the orders that they’ve completed, what their pay is, what our dispatch fee is… Everything is broken down for them and really easy to figure out. What they made, what their expenses were, and what the net profit was.
We had close to 20 trucks when we started with Axon, and we’ve been able to increase our fleet. But on top of that, we’ve been able to save a lot of time, so we haven’t had to hire any staff. We are able to increase without stress, and we don’t have to go out there and search for someone who we hopefully feel is going to work out for us.
It saves us time on a monthly and yearly basis as well. We’re able to invest that money somewhere else instead of wasting it on more staff to get the work done. We’re close to 30 trucks now, but we do a lot of brokerage work as well. We’re able to broker out loads and do that kind of stuff – track anything from our own trucks, to owner-operators, to third parties that do our work.
It’s amazing. You put it in as an order, and you have your order confirmation. Say you’re entering a load that was brokered, you’re able to categorize it in a different area, called a carrier expense category, and you can track it down, including what you’re paying them versus what you keep.
When you’re creating invoices and going to pay them, you just click on the order, generate their invoice and that’s that. They get paid and it’s very simple.
No, not at all.
You know what? By a hundred percent. Whenever we have any customers who want to track an order, or if they want information from a year ago like a POD, we are literally able to put in that invoice and track down the whole order, plus the POD attached to it. It’s there in the system, the information is right there and it’s easily trackable.
You guys have been phenomenal from beginning to end. When I started, I was a little bit scared. I was hesitant to change. I’m not the type of person that sits well with change, so when I started with Axon I was nervous. But once I got the training and go the help that I needed, I felt comfortable. I felt confident in the program.
The great thing is, even now when any of my employees or myself have issues, you guys are just a phone call away and so easy to deal with. I’ll leave a message sometimes if you guys are really busy, but I know that I’m going to be receiving a call back within half an hour to an hour. If it’s a difficult question for them, there is always somebody else that can get on it right away, and that’s what I love about Axon support.
Transitioning was very simple, very easy, and Axon spent a lot of time training myself and my staff as well. Everybody is very comfortable with the system now.
It’s beyond my imagination. To be honest with you, I can’t thank Axon enough for making our whole business structured and just making that part of our business a lot easier. We’re able to see where our net profit is. We’re able to see all our expenses. We’re able to see orders.
The great thing is that it’s all in one, whereas we used to have a trucking software and an accounting software so there was a lot of back and forth. It was very stressful for our accounting team to track that back and forth, so Axon has made our life a lot easier and we love Axon.
Love it. I actually promote you guys a lot, whenever I talk to anybody. I just let them know that it’s a great return on your investment. In any industry, you want to know what’s happening with your business – inside and out.
We’ve gotten busier. We’ve hired outside brokers in addition to our company drivers. Our sales have more than doubled, and we’ve kept the same two people. If you look at how many tickets we do compared to last year and the year before, we’re doing a lot more.
In the same amount of time that it took to do 600 tickets, we’re doing 1,000 tickets in that time frame. We’ve almost doubled sales and weekly tickets and have not increased staff at all. I think that only if we were to double our tickets again, would we have to add another person.
I think so, yes. I think Axon has really helped us keep our staff number down. If we were still using the old system, we would have definitely needed another full-time person with the addition of all the extra tickets.
It has given us flexibility. Some of our bigger customers might want a ticket just for the sand in, and then they want a ticket for the dirt out, all on the same job. In the old system, we would have to enter all the sand tickets, run an invoice, enter the dirt out, and run an invoice to get the totals.
With Axon we have the flexibility to change things, and give customers the answers they want on their invoice, without having to do the same thing for everybody.
The support at Axon is really good. If you email them, they usually call you within a few minutes to take care of the problem. Our trainer was really good too. I guess we do things a little bit different than a lot of companies do, so she helped us tweak the training to work for the way we do things.
Overall, Axon has been a big improvement here. If we made a mistake in our old system, we had to wait a week for the IT person to come in and correct the mistake. With Axon, you have the option to delete things and re-enter them correctly if you want.
For bigger problems, all you have to do is call support and they can log right into your computer, look at the problem, tell you what we did wrong, and be done with the phone call in 10 or 15 minutes. To me, that is a big improvement form what we had before.
I would definitely say that it is very good software, because it’s really aimed at trucking. That’s the type of company that we are, and it has been very helpful.
NEW! PAYROLL REGISTER OPTION
Do you have employees in various jurisdictions?
Choose the Print Description Totals checkbox on the Payroll Register to see a breakdown of your company’s expenses by Type and Description for each payroll jurisdiction.
You can now compare earnings, deductions, and benefits from one jurisdiction to another.
Business growth and development relies on accurate, current information. Axon’s Executive Briefing provides business owners and managers with a handy summary of their company’s financial situation and can help pinpoint problem areas or unexpected results.
ASSIGNING EXPENSES TO A TRUCKING TRANSACTION
There are now two options when you want to assign an expense (for example, the permit for an oversized load) back to an order, trip, ticket, or project:
- Use the Trucking Tran# field on invoices, checks, equipment or driver statements, and reimbursements to link an expense to a particular transaction.
- Choose the Ticket Distribution button on Invoices > Payables tab to distribute payables line items between multiple tickets
Items that are an expense to your company will be included on the Order Master Report, Trip Master Report, Ticket History Report, or the Project History Report.
SCANNING DOCUMENTS
If you’re scanning a large document, you may prefer a black and white format or a lower resolution setting to keep the PDF smaller so you don’t go over the size limit for email attachments. You can change your company’s scanner settings on the Business > Setup Options > Customization tab. The minimum resolution is 100 dpi and the maximum is 500 dpi. If the Scan Resolution is left blank, the default resolution for your scanner will be used. If the chosen resolution is not supported by your scanner, you will be notified when scanning and the default resolution will be used.
If you connect a new scanner to your computer, you may need to leave and return to the current page to use scanning.
If you’re using a flatbed scanner, you’ll receive a prompt after each page to continue scanning.
