“WE’VE ALMOST DOUBLED SALES AND WEEKLY TICKETS WITH NO INCREASE IN STAFF.”
“Axon Has Really Helped Us Keep Our Staff Numbers Down.”
When a company wants to grow, they need systems in place that they can count on. Metro Transport Inc. from Brighton is a perfect example of that. We stopped in for an interview with Sharon, to hear their story about how Axon Software helped them keep up, when sales and ticket numbers doubled in a short time.
We started using Axon last March. We went from an old-fashioned type of system to this one. I shouldn’t even talk about the old stuff – when we converted to Axon, it was like night and day from the system we had before. It’s more integrated. You can look things up a lot easier with Axon, and duplicating tickets really helps out with data entry.
Using Axon, we can email invoices to our customers. In the old system we could not do that. You can look up account information, then go right back to the screen you were on, which is very nice. In the old system we had to write down an invoice number, then go someplace else and look things up that way. Time consuming.
Ticket entry in Axon is a lot easier, because you can use copy ticket. Sometimes a lot of our jobs are repetitive loads. We’ll do probably 800-1000 tickets in a week, so when we’re doing repetitive loads, we copy the ticket. It makes it a lot easier.
I am Sharon Allender, the Accountant for Metro Transport Inc. We are located in Brighton, Michigan, and we haul sand and gravel.
They like it. It was a little different than what we had given them before, but everyone switched over and they don’t have a problem.
We do. We’ve called Axon and they’ll walk us through setting up a report, but we’ve been so busy we don’t have time to figure it out ourselves. The reports that Axon have set up for us are really helpful, because it gives us exactly the information we need.
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.
THE INFORMATION YOU NEED, WHEN YOU NEED IT
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.
The Executive Briefing is completely integrated with your company’s dispatching and accounting information, so you have access to the most recent information – payments received in the morning’s mail or new orders placed a minute ago. And it’s completely confidential. You can decide who will be able to view and use the screen.
In addition, the Executive Briefing is customizable. You choose the items and accounts you want to be able to review at a glance to manage your company effectively. For example:
- GL accounts you want to monitor.
- Orders/tickets that haven’t yet been invoiced.
- Total amount of outstanding Receivables and Payables broken down by aging period.
Once you’ve reviewed your financial summary, you can dig deeper to obtain more detailed information. For example, double clicking on the AR Aging takes you to the Receivable Report, while double clicking on Outstanding Orders takes you to the Order History Report.
Axon’s Executive Briefing makes sure you have the information you need, when you need it – at the click of a mouse.
SECURE WEB ACCESS FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS
Axon’s secure web access portal will provide your customers and their clients with up-to-date information about their trucking transactions.
By using Web Access, your customers will be able to go online to:
- Create and submit order tenders
- View or receive email notification of the status of their orders/tickets
- Review order attachments (for example, a PDF of a bill of lading) and
- View and print a copy of their invoices
Your drivers can also take advantage of Web Access to view their driver confirmations.
Axon’s Web Access can be customized with your choice of banner and a direct link to your company’s website. You can also choose to have customers log in to Web Access from your company’s website.
