Piles of paper tickets, a hundred spreadsheets, and manual data entry - that’s what accounting/billing teams are up against — every single day. 

Even though there have been significant tech advancements in the past decade, many fuel marketers are still invested in paper-based processes/outdated legacy systems as though it’s the 90s. 

And that’s where the biggest challenge is. 

Your billers/accountants are stuck doing repetitive manual tasks - like hand keying data into the back-office, chasing around dispatchers, drivers and a bunch of documents just to verify the delivery numbers and figure out what happened during a shift. 

Even with legacy software things don’t change much. Because legacy systems are outdated - and usually don’t integrate well with your existing systems - your team still has to do the manual work. (Here’s more about why legacy systems don’t cut it).

Let’s get to the root cause of why these manual, outdated processes don’t work….

Foremost thing - the manual grind is not what your team signed up for. There is a lot more strategic work that your accounting team should be focusing on as opposed to spending most of their day doing work that can easily be automated. And at a time when the industry is growing so rapidly - in this ‘high tide lifts all boats’ situation - the last thing you need to be worried about is manual work. 

And it’s not just that. These manual processes cost your company millions of dollars. And profit margins didn’t take a hit. And it slows you down - which is not ideal when you’re trying to achieve scalable growth. 

So, how to make back-office workflows more efficient? 

The answer is pretty simple actually - dispatch software. 

With completely digitized dispatch workflows and integrations with your existing back office systems, accounting/invoicing is much more streamlined and efficient. 

Here’s exactly how a fuel dispatch software helps…

Real-time visibility that lets you account for every drop of fuel 

If there’s ONE thing that has been a common challenge for fuel marketers - it’s the lack of visibility into operations. And that has a serious impact on the accounting/billing side of things. 

Here’s why. 

There’s no way to track what happened during a shift (basically not knowing what and how much is delivered/loaded/retained). If there are any errors in delivery data (due to fuel leakages, or theft or just another instance of  ‘wrong product delivered’) - it’s almost impossible to verify it. And this translates into losing millions of dollars because fuel worth millions of dollars goes unaccounted for. 

The solution? Real-time tracking - which is what a fuel dispatch software does. You have real-time visibility into truck inventory - so you know exactly what goes in and out of trucks. You have an accurate account of every drop of fuel - so you know you're not leaving money on the table. 

Know exactly what happened during every shift in real time

More on operational visibility - https://www.fleetpanda.com/solutions/use-case/get-operational-visibility/

Accurate BOL Tracking 

With auto BOL linking and tracking - accountants don’t have to rummage through piles of paper and manually enter BOL information into the back-office systems. Everything happens at the click of a button. 

You can accurately track BOLs and basically know exactly what happened with the fuel - whether it was delivered, self used, flush, expansion, contraction.  You can easily track all this without phone calls or the need to go through tons of paperwork. It’s all captured in the dispatch system which syncs with your back-office system - eliminating all the manual and paperwork. 

Generate quicker, error-invoices

The one part of fuel dispatch software is about knowing what happened during a shift - basically getting an entire paper trail of the shift - what time your drivers logged in and out, which customers did they deliver to, what was loaded, retained etc - all the information to the T is available in real-time. 

The other part of this is sending all the delivery-related information to your back-office systems to invoice customers. 

And you’ll be amazed to know the amount of time billers actually end up spending in just going back and forth with verifying shifts, putting that data into the back-office and getting invoices out the door. 

Billers have to wait for drivers to get back all the paperwork from the field before they can verify shifts and create invoices. 

Even if you’re using legacy systems (which may or may not integrate with the back office system) - even though dispatch might be digitized - you still have to handkey that delivery information into the BO systems. 

Either way -  the chances of errors are high because of what we like to call ‘human in the loop’. Because there’s so much paper and manual work to deal with - inaccurate delivery information goes into the BO system and that turns into an inaccurate invoice sent to customers. 

Plus - the manual work slows you down. You can’t bill customers on the same day. And your time-to-cash cycles also become longer. But with a modern fuel dispatch software like FleetPanda - that’s one less thing you need to worry about. With a smooth integration with your BO system - all the delivery information is synced into the BO in just a click.  

Push all your delivery data into your back-office/accounting system - in just a click.

No manual data entry - just a single source of truth for all your data. So you’re able to generate invoices much faster, there are no chances of errors from all the manual data entry and the payment cycles are faster. 

Here’s what Carl Kleimann, Co-owner of Moffit Services says about this - 

“Automating our billing processes is saving our billing department a considerable amount of time while ensuring accuracy.” 

Check out the full video -

The bottom line is - an integrated dispatch and accounting system always works better than one where work is done in silos. 

With that in place - back office efficiency increases significantly. There’s higher accuracy. Invoices go out the door much faster. And the accounting teams that used to spend anywhere around 2 hours of their day on just paperwork - don't have to anymore. 

And who doesn’t want that? 

Ready to see how exactly FleetPanda can help your back-office teams operate more efficiently and have a positive impact on your bottom line? Happy to give you a walkthrough. Feel free to book a personalized demo with our product experts.