Big companies have people for the follow-up. Someone to watch the terminals. Someone to chase invoices. Someone to turn Friday’s work orders into invoices.
Small companies have you.
It’s 6:50 on a Tuesday. The coffee isn’t ready, but the phone is already ringing. A customer wants to know where their container is. A driver needs the address again. Somewhere on the whiteboard there’s a last free day that might be today, if anyone could read the marker.
None of this is hard work. It’s a lot of small work, and most of it is waiting before the first truck leaves.
We build software for people in offices like that one: dispatchers at container carriers and owners of truck repair shops. Their days look different. Their worries are close. Will the next delivery go out on time? Will the truck in the bay be ready? Did we bill that?
Here are two desks: where the day goes, one fix for this week, and what our software takes off the desk.
The repair shop: the job on the clipboard
It’s Thursday afternoon. A trailer is in the bay for a brake job. The tech writes the parts and the hours on a paper work order, and the sheet goes on the clipboard with the others.
On Friday, if there’s time, someone copies the job into an invoice. They work out GST and QST on a calculator. They fix the parts sheet, if they remember. A fleet customer with several jobs this month gets several invoices, or a stapled pile. Then the customer’s accountant emails to ask for copies.
Nobody here is slow. But a sheet lost in the pile is the job that never gets billed.
Fix it this week: bill each job the day it’s done, straight from the work order. The job that waits a week is the one that gets forgotten.
In UTX Garage, the job lives on one work order, from the estimate to the bill.
- A brake job or an oil change starts from a saved job, with the parts and labour already on it.
- When the job moves to In progress, its parts come off stock. A low-stock list shows what to reorder.
- When the work is done, one click turns it into an invoice. Several jobs for the same customer can go on one invoice, with GST and QST worked out on each taxed line.
- The invoice goes out by email as a PDF, with the customer’s accountant copied.
- If you run Garage inside UTX Freight, statements go out on a schedule, and customers who owe nothing are skipped.
Still yours: the diagnosis, the customer’s OK on the estimate, and the payments. When parts arrive, you update the count. Online estimate approval and photos aren’t there yet.
The carrier: the container that can’t wait
Back to that Tuesday morning. A customer emails a delivery order as a PDF. The dispatcher types the container number, the reference, the terminal and the address into the system.
Then the checking starts. Is the box off the train at CN? Has customs released it? Is it ready at the Port of Montreal? Each answer is a login and a search, one container at a time. The last free day goes on the whiteboard. Once it passes, storage is charged by the day.
A driver gets the address over the phone. The signed POD comes back on paper, days later. And all day, customers call to ask where their container is.
Fix it this week: keep every last free day in one list, sorted by date, with one owner. Read it before the first truck leaves. A whiteboard nobody owns is how containers get forgotten. Our last-free-day checklist has the rest of the morning routine.
In UTX Freight, the office and the drivers use the same system.
- For orders in progress, CN, the Port of Montreal and MGT are checked every 10 minutes.
- At Termont and MGT, blank fields like seal, weight and steamship line fill in from the terminal. Nothing you typed is changed.
- When a last free day is today, tomorrow or the day after, the container goes on the alerts page. A daily email lists the alerts for whoever signs up.
- The dispatcher texts the driver a link. The move opens in the phone’s browser. There is no app to install.
- The driver signs on the phone at delivery. The POD is on the order right away, and the container status changes.
- Customers log in to see their own orders and signed PODs.
- Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, an email lists finished orders that aren’t billed yet. Statements go out on the schedule you set.
Still yours: the order, the driver, the chassis and the pickup time. A chassis past due for inspection gets a warning, not a block. Billing ticks the orders to invoice, and the totals and tax follow. QuickBooks gets a file to import, not a live connection.
Coming soon: an order email becomes a draft order, with your terminals and customers matched. A dispatcher approves each draft before it becomes an order. It isn’t on for customers yet.
That’s what we mean by simple software. Less paper to chase, fewer calls to answer, and the same small team gets through the big days. Next, AI will take some of the typing, starting with order emails. A person will still OK every draft.
Count it yourself
We don’t put a number on the hours this saves. We haven’t measured yours. So count it yourself. Pick one job or one container from last week. Follow it from start to finish, and write down:
- How many times was the same thing written or typed?
- How many places does it live now?
- Which reminder lived only in someone’s head?
- Who called whom to ask for something that already existed?
If the answers are “a lot”, that’s work to take off your desk. It doesn’t have to be with our software. A shared list with one owner already beats three copies on three desks.
The work was never the problem. Doing it twice was.
If you’d like to do that count with us, the button is just below.