Why Marketers Across the Country are Implementing Accounting and Dispatch Systems Together
When petroleum marketers look for optimization opportunities within their business, accounting and dispatch emerge as the two primary functions. Implementing state-of-the-art systems here gets you to a new degree of efficiency and helps improve the customer experience.
Companies like Tyree Oil and 3L are now upgrading their accounting and dispatch operations together. In fact, some of them now implement a dispatch software before migrating to a new accounting system. Here are some reasons why.
Accounting and dispatch are two sides of the same coin to achieve order-to-cash automation. The ultimate objective of modernizing your operations is to automate the entire workflow starting from order placement to cash inflow. To design this entire architecture, just migrating to a new accounting system isn’t enough. There are decisions around data models and workflows that cut across the entire order-to-cash workflow, such as what items should be on the system of record, how the credit verification process will be set up before dispatching a load, etc.
To achieve operational efficiency from the get go, it’s much cleaner to plan the entire architecture early on instead of reworking later. For this, you need architects from both the dispatch team and the accounting team working on this together. For example, if you choose FleetPanda for your dispatch operations, we have already worked with most major accounting systems on joint implementation projects and can help design the practices right from Day 0.
A cutting-edge dispatch system along with accounting helps you stand out. Often, when petroleum distributors focus on optimizing only their accounting, they diminish their chances to be truly innovative. As a distributor, their competitive advantage should be operations and not how they do taxes! Thus, we see companies who choose the best dispatch systems end up winning more often than not.
We recommend marketers choose from the best-in-class systems in both accounting and dispatch. 2 telltale signs of a top dispatch solution are a smartphone & cloud-based infrastructure and a trial period to evaluate the system.
A petroleum-specific dispatch software brings in industry expertise. Accounting systems tackle a wide variety of industries from manufacturing to food to energy to retail. Though some of them have entered into the petroleum space, they are often unaware of its nuances. On the other hand, petroleum dispatch is a very complex use case where you need to take care of suppliers, tankers, real-time inventory. etc. This is why you need to have a dispatch software customized for the petroleum industry instead of using a generic dispatch module inside the accounting software. At FleetPanda, for example, we integrate with all major accounting systems and we make it extremely easy to translate industry best practices into data workflows. We even help our clients select the right accounting system!
Shortens the timeline and allows you to start testing in a matter of weeks. Implementing the account and dispatch systems together makes things move much faster. While the dispatch implementation team is onsite, they can quickly uncover workflows and practices that are unique to each company. They can then promptly add any customizations and adjustments and also make the accounting system architects aware of this.
In addition, while the implementation is going on, you can simultaneously work with 1-2 drivers/dispatchers to get them trained and use the dispatch software on 1-2 trucks. This ensures that you start testing in the sandbox much faster without any rework later.
If you made it this far, you are probably interested in trying this approach out. Here is what FleetPanda brings to the table:
- Modern dispatch software solution custom-built for petroleum marketers built by Amazon and Netflix engineers from Silicon Valley
- Supports multiple business lines: fleet fueling, wet hosing, tank wagons, truck & trailer, transport
- Integrates seamlessly with back-office systems like DM2, PetroleumRX, NetSuite and Sage
- 24*7 support and dedicated customizations team
- Risk-free pilot program to help you get started quickly and inexpensively
In the last 12 months, we have successfully migrated many companies from old legacy solutions and helped them upgrade their business operations. To know more about FleetPanda and how we can help you improve your order-to-cash process, book a 15 minute call at https://www.fleetpanda.com/contact-us.
