Welcome to the third edition of our R&D blog series.
Do you want to grow your wholesale business? Of course you do. And when you succeed? What impact will it have on your organization? You’ll be moving more gallons, pricing and dispatching to more customers, and your competition isn’t going to go away quietly either. They’ll be as aggressive as ever. Selling in new states? Great, but you’ll have new sets of taxes to file too. By some accounts manually filing motor fuel returns in a single state can take as much as 80 hours per month – that’s a half time employee. How will you manage it all?
Automation!
To grow your business you’ll need software capabilities to help you compete, and those same capabilities will be necessary to help you sustain the increased scope of your business. Here are just some of the tools you’ll need in your software tool box.
ePricing
We all know competitive pricing is essential, but what good will it do if your customers and prospects don’t know what you can offer? And what if in the rush to publish competitive pricing you get it wrong? You could find yourself delivering product at unsustainable margins. We have the answer with the ADD Energy E3® ePrice Quote module.
In a highly customizable and automatic process, you will email 100% accurate quotes to customers and prospects. For prices based on a margin over cost, you will not only generate the quotes automatically, but those prices will be based on costs you received from your suppliers automatically, even mid-day price changes. Perfect for your customers and effortless for you.
When the quotes are accepted they can easily can be turned into orders. And when all is said and done, there are no surprises for your customers because the invoices match the quotes, and there are no phone calls for you (except when they order again).
Of course, you will need to deliver those products, efficiently, on time, loading at the right supply points and with minimal freight. It’s time for…
Wholesale Dispatching
Delivering millions of gallons per year to many customers in multiple states doesn’t just happen. And while ADD Energy E3 won’t dispatch your orders automatically, it can help make you the most reliable and most economical supplier available to your customers, all the while making sure each and every load is profitable for you. When reviewing hauler options for your orders, you can’t miss it – the profitable options are green, and problems with respect to a quote and hauler combination appear in red.
Just pick the right haulers and transmit the orders. The haulers receive emails with every detail – pickup points, alternate supply points, accessorial authorizations, your instructions, customer instructions, split load recommendations – all appropriate for the vehicles and geographical regions involved.
The bottom line? Profitable, timely deliveries and satisfied customers.
Taxes!
Are your haulers delivering product for you in more than one state? Crossing state lines with product? Congratulations. You’ve grown your business. But we don’t have to tell you what that means in terms of state motor fuel taxes. Schedules and returns for every conceivable fuel, intra- and inter-state tracking, tax rates constantly on the move, evolving filing formats and requirements. Managing this, especially if you are rapidly expanding, can burden your organization, and it can’t be ignored.
The ADD Energy E3 Electronic State Motor Fuels Tax Reporting module is your answer. You can file in multiple states, in the format they require – paper, PDF, Excel, XML, EDI flat file – literally in hours (as opposed to days). One of our clients indicated that they could file for Virginia in 2 hours, while another client currently NOT using our tax reporting module indicated that filing in New Hampshire takes 70 to 80 hours a month. How does it work? All the delivery data is extracted from your ADD Energy E3 database and loaded into schedules and returns. This module alone has made it possible for wholesale operations to expand their geographical reach without additional staffing.
What’s Next?
ADD Energy E3 as well as Atlas, AP Verification and SmartConnect can help your wholesale business in many more ways. If you are an ADD customer, contact your sales representative to learn more, or visit our new customer portal to view the Release Notes, participate in our Forum, or join our User Group. Not a customer but want more information? We’re happy to help. Contact us at sales@addsys.com or at 800-922-0972.
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