Running a barge fleeting operation requires attention to an incredible array of details. It takes a well-trained and experienced team to ensure that customers receive excellent service. All activities associated with handling your customer’s barges and cargo need to be tracked in detail to ensure their expectations are met and that invoices are correct. The team at BargeOps has been helping our inland marine customers for over a decade with our full-featured suite of BargeOps software. And now we’re making it even easier for fleeting operators to make use of BargeOps with our introduction of our latest software as a service product … BargeOps Fleet Management
BargeOps Fleet Management helps you deliver great service to your customers by keeping track of barges from the time they are inbound to your fleet until they’ve departed and you invoice for services provided.
All services are recorded as events on tickets for each barge. With BargeOps Fleet Management, just log in via your web browser and quickly review all open tickets for the barges in your fleet. You can quickly see the critical details including: the service was provided, service locations, the boats involved, the time period (start and completion), the status of the barge (commodity, loaded/empty, cleaned, leaking, repaired, etc.), and the billing details (rate, fuel, high water, total due).
Do you have 15 barges coming in on a tow? No problem. It’s easy with BargeOps to record the event, like a Midstream In, for all 15 instead of one at a time. This saves time for the dispatchers.
Once you’re ready to invoice, head over to the Billing Review screen and search by date, customer, ticket status or ticket type. Enter the criteria and hit Find, or just hit Find to see all of your tickets. Select those that are ready to invoice to mark them. Easy. The billing department can take it from there to generate the invoices and export them to send to customers.
BargeOps Fleet Management offers two types of invoices: Barge Ticket Bills and Parts & Service Bills.
The ticket Billing Review process is easy and enables you to:
- Review all billable activity for the month, including the fleeting that occurred during the month
- View this information by date range, view by customer, view only closed tickets (so you can bill once everything is done), or view all tickets.
- Correct any rate information or other details that may need to be corrected to ensure that all line items are correct
- Mark tickets as Ready to Invoice
Once the review process is complete, the billing department can run the go to the Invoice tab and generate invoices which can then be printed or exported as a PDF to send to your customers.
If you have Parts & Service Bills like an hourly boat rental or charter, a lock assist, taxi services, or selling fuel, water, or even repairs to a boat, these costs can be entered into BargeOps Fleet Management to create a Parts & Service Bill. They system is designed with a great deal of flexibility around this concept given the wide range of examples we’ve seen from our customers.
We haven’t covered everything available in BargeOps Fleet Management by a long shot. We’ll save details like security and permissions, creating master rate lists, and a host of other configurable options for future posts.
We invite you to Contact Us for a demo. We’d love to show you how BargeOps Fleet Management can transform your business!
