“WE HAVE ALMOST DOUBLED OUR TRUCKS SINCE WE STARTED USING AXON.”
“Without It, we’d probably need about 3 more people. There is no way we could do it – we would still be working late nights.”
The accounting department at Savage Transport says that life is better, even after doubling the number of trucks they operate. There used to be stressful late nights doing payroll. Now they have the freedom to go home at 5 pm. We spoke with accounting manager Candace Zerbey to learn about how things at Savage have changed since implementing Axon Software.
We started off hauling frac sand. We’ve grown; we do a lot of reefer stuff now. We’ve actually grown that side of the company recently. We have hoppers where we can haul grains, corn, and beans, stuff like that. We have pneumatics for all the sand. We have step decks, so we can haul anything on those as well.
Typically, we’re a regional hauler – Oklahoma and Texas. We are currently in Ohio doing some stuff up there though, and our reefer guys are OTR.
When Savage became Savage, they weren’t using it at first. We decided March of this year to utilize Axon, because we’ve grown so much and we needed our life to be easier.
I’ve had ups and downs, trying to get everything set up. Any time you do anything new, you’re building and growing, there are always headaches, and I’m aware of that. But calling Axon and the support staff have gotten to know me by name. They’ve learned my temperament, for lack of a better word.
I get frustrated, because I’m trying to understand, and I tend to make mountains out of molehills, but my experience with everybody has been amazing.
They are very patient. Like I said, I can be a little bit tough on the phone sometimes when I get frustrated. If I think I know what I’m talking about . . . and maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m not understanding something the correct way.
Axon has been patient with me, so it’s great. I call them weekly, basically, or I’ll put in an email for a support question and they are quick to get back to me.
My name is Candace Zerbey and I work for Savage Transport. We are located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I am the accounting manager, so I do all of the payroll, accounting, payables, and receivables.
We’re able to pull reports now, and I can look at almost anything that I need to in terms of the financial side, the trucking side, the employee side. Before, probably like most companies, we were using Quickbooks. You can do a lot in Quickbooks, but it doesn’t handle everything that you need to do.
Of course, you can’t dispatch out of Quickbooks so you’re having to use another system for that, and then integrate everything over into Quickbooks, and they don’t talk well together.
When we moved to Axon, there were of course some bumps getting set up, because we didn’t start at the beginning of the year, but they were great in helping us get it all going. It has just been wonderful. It really has.
Before Axon, we would be here, us girls in the accounting department, until midnight 2 to 3 nights out of the week, just trying to get everything done for payroll purposes.
Once we started with Axon, we could scan all of our drivers’ paperwork in, attach it to orders, invoice through Axon, pay out of Axon. There were no more midnight shifts. We were leaving at 5 o’clock every day. It really sped everything up.
Before, to do a driver settlement we were actually using Google Docs and an Excel sheet, and just copying and pasting. We were actually dispatching off of a Google Doc. When we did fuel, we actually printed the fuel reports off from the fuel websites and entered them manually. Not having to do that now, in itself saves us a lot of time.
I would say maybe 4 hours out of the week are saved, compared to the way we were doing it. We were printing off the report, manually looking at a total, and slapping that total on an Excel spreadsheet per tractor. That’s a thing of the past now.
It takes minutes to upload the fuel report, and then it creates an invoice and attaches it to the tractor. When I generate, it’s already there. It shows the fuel discounts, where they were, how much they got, the cost of the fuel, everything. The drivers love it
They like them a lot. It actually breaks it down. Their pay shows what the haul load was, the base pay rate, what their percentage is, what the total payout is. When the driver has to sit a long time at a well, they get demurrage sometimes, so it breaks everything down for them. They see the city where they picked and the city where they dropped, so they know which jobs they are looking at. It even shows the order number on the settlement.
We were doing that before too – showing the order number, their pay, and their demurrage. But again, it was on an Excel spreadsheet and we were having to print them off, scan them in, email them to the driver. Now it’s just click, click, click, and we’re done.
Well, we used to have to print everything off, and we’d have to scan it in individually. We would have to match up the invoice with QuickBooks, with the driver paperwork, and scan them in as a batch so we could send it to the customer. Now you just go into Receivables, go to Print Invoices, click Load, click Email, and it sends them all out. It’s amazing.
We’ve added an accounting person since we’ve grown, but that’s mainly because of the workload. We’ve grown truck-wise, so we have more work coming in. I’m so glad we had Axon; we wouldn’t have changed it for anything. It sped up our invoicing process and our payroll process, but the workload that came in required another body.
We have almost doubled our trucks since we started using Axon, and we’ve only needed to hire one additional accounting person. Without it, we’d probably need about 3 more people. There is no way we could do it – we would still be working late nights.
It helps when they say they didn’t get an invoice. We can just go into receivables, click on invoice, pull up the invoice number that they need, and re-send it. It’s really easy.
We used to have to go into our document folder and search for things – sometimes it would be group scanned in and we’d have to print it off, isolate the one invoice they needed, rescan it, and re-email it. . . . That’s a thing of the past.
I think it has. I would say it probably paid for itself – in terms of man-hours that we’ve saved – after anywhere from 8 months to a year.
I’d say that it’s wonderful and I recommend it to anybody. To anybody who is not utilizing everything that Axon has to offer, they’re not getting their full money’s worth. You can use the order side for trucking, the payroll side, even the work orders side for our maintenance.
We just added the Work Orders and Inventory systems a couple months ago, and we are still integrating everything, getting it all set, but we are super excited to be able to do Purchase Orders through there with how it talks to Accounts Payable. It’s really going to help smooth things out on that side as well.
FILTERING & SORTING ON THE ORDER MASTER REPORT
The Order Master Report provides you with two different ways to select information based on Drivers.
Use the Equipment/Drivers/Carriers Filters if you want to see all the orders where a driver has been entered. If there are two Drivers on an Order, you will see both Drivers’ portions of the Order.
Use the Pay Filters if you want to see all the orders for which a driver was paid. Using this option, you will only see the driver’s portion of the orders
If you sort by driver, the Order Master Report will list the driver’s portion of the revenue that has been allocated to the assignment line. If there is more than one driver, the driver’s portion will be prorated based on the amount of pay or shared equally among the drivers.
Depending on the filter and sort options that you use, the total revenue listed may not equal 100% of the order revenue.
TROUBLESHOOTING ROLES & PERMISSIONS
Keep in mind the following points when assigning roles and permissions to ensure that each of your employees has access to the appropriate information.
Full Access takes priority over Read-only. If a user is given one role that has Full Access to a section of the program and another role that has Read-only access to the same section, then the user will have Full Access to the section.
If you want to give a role access to a whole section of the program, add their name at the highest level of the section. Once you’ve given the role access to a section, you can remove permission for specific options within the section (e.g. the role has Full Access to the Tickets section but Read-only access to the Rate Tables).
Setting Permissions for custom tabs will prevent users from seeing the custom tab on the data entry screen and from using or seeing the fields from that tab in Reporter Reports. The fields may still be visible in some circumstances, for instance if they were chosen as columns on a standard report.
