Many people who call or email with questions think they need to purchase freight broker software. After all, technology can provide a real pop to business transactions. But, here's the truth. Software is not needed, starting out. Yes, I do recommend using some type of general ledger software to record income and expenses and to send invoices and prepare checks. QuickBooks is the winner here. Other than that software, we provide spreadsheets that are ready to go for recording, monitoring and analyzing load activity.
Here is a sample of transactions that you will be doing:
- Searching the Internet for customers or carriers,
- Making a lot of phone calls,
- Sending faxes, usually all you need to change each time is the cover sheet,
- Receiving faxes,
- Setting up carriers as vendors and shippers as customers in QB,
- Recording load activity into QB,
- Printing out financial statements, usually on a monthly basis,
- Entering load information into spreadsheets,
- Etc., etc., etc.
Your first line of duty is to get customers and the best software in the world won't help on this; it will help MANAGE your customers and loads once you build a good base of activity. But it won't help in your search for customers.
Keep this in mind and don't spend a lot of money on freight broker software until the business demands it.
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