Accounts - Payment account

Accounts - Payment account

Payment or Fixed cost accounts are designed to track deductions for any recurring payment. These payments can be set to an automatic deduction. The automatic deduction will work for the payments that are the same every pay cycle. (Payments that do change every cycle have to be entered as an expense on the a trip record. Payments that change every time are not "fixed cost" because they change and therefore can not be accurately predicted). The driver can setup the payment to be taken out on weekly, bi-weekly or monthly bases. Deductions per odometer or per dispatched mile can also be used. The software will deduct the payment from the first available trip. The deductions start from the account "open date" and end on the account "closed date".

No charges can be made to a payment account type. In other words the driver cannot draw from the payment type account, cannot settle any [maintenance] cost against a payment account, To settle maintenance cost against an account the driver needs to create a [savings type account].

To setup a payment account:
The "New" button starts a new account. The Account name is whatever the driver wants to call it.. The Valid From and To are the dates this account is active. In other words the automatic deduction from the trip pay will only apply to the trips that fall within this time frame. To setup the payroll deductions the driver enters the amount in to the Payroll Deductions field and specifies how the deduction is made. There are 5 (five) available deduction types: Every Dispatched Mile, Every Odometer Mile, Every Week, Every two Weeks and Every Month.

In the example above the deduction is set to $592.24 every week. The software will automatically deduct $592.24 from the trip pay and place it under this account. Since the deduction is set to happen once a week the software will deduct this amount from the first available trip once a week.

If you already have trips in the database and the account "From" date is in the past the software will automatically apply the deduction to the trips starting from the date the account "open date" until the "close date" or today's date, whichever comes first. Thus if there are trips from the beginning of 2007 and today a new account is created with start date on 01-February-2007, a deduction of $592.24 a week and closing date set sometime in the future the software will scan through all the trips from 01-February-2007 up to now and apply $592.24 deduction a week.

$ every dispatched mile

This option tells the software to scan all the trips from the account start date up to close date or up till today (whichever comes first) and deduct the amount specified for each dispatched mile entered for the trip toward this account.

$ every odometer mile

This option tells the software to scan all the trips from the account start date up to close date or up till today (whichever comes first) and deduct the amount specified for each odometer mile entered for the trip toward this account. This option will only work properly if driver records the odometer miles under the Trip Sheets, otherwise this option is useless and will not deduct anything

$ every week

This option tells the software to scan all the trips from the account start date up to close date or up till today (whichever comes first) and deduct the amount specified on the first trip of each week.

There is something to keep in mind if you are entering trips retroactively, (trips you have done in the past):

If the driver starts with a blank database and creates the accounts before any of the trips are entered And the account open date is way in the past the following will happen: Once the first trip is entered all payments that are due will be charged to that trip. No need to panic. Just enter the rest of your trips and then re-save the accounts. Re-saving the account will redistribute the payments among the trips that fall within the account time frame

$ every two weeks

This option tells the software to scan all the trips from the account start date up to close date or up till today (whichever comes first) and deduct the amount specified on the first trip of each two week period.

$ every month

This option tells the software to scan all the trips from the account start date up to close date or up till today (whichever comes first) and deduct the amount specified on the trip nearest to the one month time laps from the last payment or from the date the account was opened.

How the accounts reflected in the rest of the software?

The accounts are reflected in Load Information / Expenses as well as under Maintenance & Repairs and Statistics & Tax reports.

Trip Sheet / Expenses

When you create a trip under Load Information / Expenses you will see the expense summary with a pie chart. The deductions made by the automatic accounts of either type (Saving or Payment) are shown under Total Deductions and represented on the Pie chart.

Below is an example of a trip on the first week of the month that is hit with just about every payment

The Statistics & Tax reports also show accounts in more details:

Below is financial data for one week (two long trips)

Follow the colors to understand the stats results. The green is the sum of all saving type accounts existed in the time frame this report was ran, thus $150 was deducted from the trip pay and applied to the saving account (Maintenance 150), the charge against savings was $0.00, The $912.40 is the total of the Payment accounts. (See next image below). All on the dark gray area are the expenses and the total expenses are displayed under the GROSS PAY.

The GROSS PAY is the Trip pay plus fuel surcharge (none in this case) The -$742.98 is the remaining advance balance. The pay out to the drive is $1090.16. Since the $150 is the driver's money put on savings account and $742.98 is the remaining balance of what was paid in advance the total taxable is $1983.14

Maintenance screen shows the savings accounts and allows to settle a maintenance record against any of the accounts of saving type;

The balance on the account is also shown under maintenance so that the driver does not have to click on the account screen and check the balance: