It’s September, are you prepared to file your IFTA next month? If this question makes you cringe, create an account, connect your ELD, upload a fuel statement, and instantly generate an IFTA report. We’re offering our IFTA solution free of charge in Q3 if you create a Kamion account before the November 2, 2021 deadline (fill out the request a demo form at the bottom to have someone reach out to set up an account for you). If you’re unsure how this can help your business keep reading to learn more about why you’re owed money and how to get it.

IFTA stands for International Fuel Tax Agreement. The state in which you fuel up assigns that tax to you because it assumes you are using it in state. This of course doesn’t take into account that you may fuel in Chicago and drive through several states before your next stop in Los Angeles. In this scenario, Illinois is required to give back some of the tax you paid since you did not use all of the fuel there. Enter IFTA– it makes sure that states are paid only what they’re owed: for the fuel used for miles driven in state.

While IFTA gives back money to carriers, it doesn’t make it easy. Carriers need to track gallons of fuel purchased per state and miles driven per state and this information comes from different sources. Five years ago, IFTA miles were impossible to organize, but good ELD providers (like Samsara and Keep Truckin’) now provide a state mile report broken out by truck and state. Even still, state gallon tables need to be combined with the state mile tables, which is a complicated and not always accurate Excel exercise.

Some carriers opt to use their fuel cards to keep track of these data points. They pull a report with all gallons purchased for the quarter, but it doesn’t take into account how the funds are distributed across the mix of owner operators and company drivers that most small companies have. 

You may be asking ‘all of this for a feature that will be used four times a year?’ The answer: yes–wrong reporting can result in audits and fines and potential revoking of trucking authority. 

We believe you should have everything you need to scale your fleet in one place:

• Kamion integrates with your ELD provider and records the miles for each truck. 
• Kamion integrates with your fuel card provider to receive information around fuel purchases. 
• These processes are occurring without your intervention so once the IFTA month comes, our users need to only click a button and the report is ready to be filed with the state. 
• To ensure the bill is distributed equitably, in a couple of clicks IFTA report can be filtered by truck with all miles driven and fuel purchased by that truck. 
• The report is easily sharable so you can send or print the report to provide the owner operator of proof.

Submit the form below and request a free demo right now

About Kamion

We are logistics lifers obsessed with making carrier lives easier through technology. We give small and mid-sized fleets access to the First Digital Carrier Platform so they can make sense and actually use their own data to improve operations. This means easy planning, zero-effort tracking, stress-free dispatching, no more safety headaches, and dedicated Carrier Consultants to guide you along the way. For more information, please visit: kamion.io.

The technology revolution has created an insatiable consumer appetite for convenience. Whether it’s the all-inclusive resort, shopping at Walmart and The Home Depot, or your iPhone 12, people now expect to have everything they want and need at their fingertips.  

This transformation–and the expectation of convenience that follows–is just starting to take hold in the truckload space. We believe that truckload carriers of all shapes and sizes will soon expect to find everything they want and need to manage their fleets in one platform. Platforms have tried and many have failed to create this experience because of their inability to replicate the external loadboard inside carrier operating systems.

That’s why we are excited to announce our DAT integration into the First Digital Carrier Platform. Our customers are excited about the possibility of creating a convenience never before seen for carriers in the truckload space.

The Kamion - DAT integration–and others like it–will provide carriers:

• A single entry point to most of the demand available nationwide (via DAT and Loadsmart today, Uber and CH Robinson soon)
• Sort & filter loads using criteria relevant to your operation such as truck and load number, pickup and dropoff info, status, rates, weight, mileage and deadhead
• Instantly accept loads you find without having to manually build them (from marketplaces that offer this such as Loadsmart)
• See suggestions of follow-up loads for your trucks based on their location and availability
• Automatically post available capacity to DAT and other load boards to reduce asset idle time
• Create load price benchmarks making it easier for trucking companies to train their personnel on which one is the best load. 

With this functionality operators are spared precious time and headspace otherwise spent switching between multiple loadboards. By filtering loads to find the most interesting rates in the shortest time, carriers should expect to improve their productivity and dispatching experience, resulting in higher profit margins.

We also integrate with Loadsmart, a loadboard provider that allows you to programmatically accept loads. This further reduces transaction times through digital communication to the broker of the operator's intention to accept the load, and simultaneously adding that load's information into the Kamion dashboard.

Submit the form below and request a free demo right now

About Kamion

We are logistics lifers obsessed with making carrier lives easier through technology. We give small and mid-sized fleets access to the First Digital Carrier Platform so they can make sense and actually use their own data to improve operations. This means easy planning, zero-effort tracking, stress-free dispatching, no more safety headaches, and dedicated Carrier Consultants to guide you along the way. For more information, please visit: kamion.io.

We live in a world where customers check their FedEx and Amazon tracking numbers incessantly and monitor their GrubHub and DoorDash food deliveries in real-time. If these services exist for consumers and in such high demand, why is it so difficult to replicate them in the Full Truckload industry? 

MacroPoint, Fourkites, and Project44 are a few players who have actually replicated this experience in some way, enabling load tracking and facilitating communication to the end customer, but the list is much shorter than it should be. Many have failed and many more haven’t tried at all because connecting a shipper to its real-time truck location is harder said than done. There are a several fundamental challenges that stand in the way of a shipper getting an accurate picture of where a load is:

1. Tracking the driver's cellphone requires the driver to agree to a third party tracking. The location of the phone is recorded by downloading an app, and drivers don't want to do that. In many cases, drivers simply download the app for a moment and later delete it. 
2. ELD tracking requires the trucking company to accept a third-party app to track all their trucks. Carriers agree to accept these integrations because it is good customer service, but also because it helps lower the tracking call volume. ELD data, however, is hard to match with load data in carrier trucking platform or customer software. If the information goes through a 3PL company it becomes even harder.
3. Lack of trailer tracking may surprise some folks, but the cargo is actually inside the trailer and not inside the truck with the ELD. The trailer detaches from the truck, so if a company tracks only the truck, it does not track the load. The majority of trailers on the road are without GPS devices, so companies "track" the truck that pulls the trailer. What happens when the trucking companies use a drop yard for their trailers? 
4. Geofences are limited in their effectiveness by thousands of addresses without clear property coordinates. When a truck enters the circle around the address, it is recorded at the address, but drivers sometimes drive by delivery companies on the way to the nearby truck stop. The geofence recognizes that the driver was at the location, but then it also acknowledges that the driver left the location flagging the load as delivered. 

The Kamion Platform was designed to address these fundamental challenges and more:

• Kamion Integrates with tracking providers and feeds them with organized tracking data. It’s also integrated with ELD and trailer tracking providers (including reefer temperature tracking).

• Driver, truck, and trailer and their relationship are managed on the platform by the carrier back team. That means information is matched to each load and customer, so Kamion is well-positioned to send data via API with truck, trailer, driver, and load temperature info. 

• The Kamion platform does not read driver cellphone locations. Kamion instead reads the GPS of the truck and trailer, automatically matching it to a load, and communicating the right information to the customer or tracking providers. 

• If the carrier does not have GPS devices in its trailers, Kamion reads the data from the truck that is attached to the trailer with the load. If the load is inside trailer 5301, which is pulled by truck 500 driven by Joe the Driver, Kamion updates the load with the location of truck and trailer. 

• Finally, Kamion provides a tracking link that not only shares the current location of the load, but also miles left to deliver, time in and out for pickup (and deliveries once the load is finalized), and all load related documents/files. 

As an added bonus: the platform communicates the temperature of the reefer loads during transit. How many times has a produce customer asked you what the reefer temperature is during transit?  

About Kamion

We are logistics lifers obsessed with making carrier lives easier through technology. We give small and mid-sized fleets access to the First Digital Carrier Platform so they can make sense and actually use their own data to improve operations. This means easy planning, zero-effort tracking, stress-free dispatching, no more safety headaches, and dedicated Carrier Consultants to guide you along the way. For more information, please visit: kamion.io.