What Self-employed trucker needs
When you are on the road as much as you are, you need something reliable to help see you through the day and be able to manage your business when you are away from home. You might want to blog on the journey, work out your earnings, and take notes as you go.
You aren’t always going to sit at your company’s computer and work everything out, so you are going to need to turn to the next best thing, which is your phone. This can help you in a huge range of ways and can keep you on top of your business when you are on the road. Here are three things that every self-employed trucker needs on their phone.
#1 A way to bring in work even when you are on a job
There is no point in you sitting down and driving to the other side of the country to deliver a job and not bring something back. By making sure that you have always got a job or a couple of loads to go on a journey, even if it is along the way, you can find a little extra money in everything that you do.
You are going to need to find a source of extra work where you can pick what you do, and that won’t affect the rest of your work too much. A good place to look for shipping work would be through a reliable directory that allows you to search for work that you can specify, which can increase the effectiveness of your search and ensure you don’t waste time being shown jobs that aren’t relevant.
It can also help you with getting your business more widely known, which is excellent publicity for you. This means that you might get some loyal customers or people willing to talk about your business to their friends, which is free publicity for you.
#2 Take advantage of using the Cloud
Another useful thing you need for your phone is the apps that allow you to take advantage of the Cloud. Whether it is Microsoft’s Office Suite or the Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides bundles, use them on your phone to help you organize your business’s documents. This can be especially important if you are picking up work along the way and want to add to your earning spreadsheets as you get the work and deliver it successfully.
This can be important to improving the level of admin organization within your business (which is vitally important for doing your taxes and looking at how your business is doing) and should therefore be used continuously. It is well worth learning how to use programs like Excel and Google Sheets to make sure that you are making the most out of the software, whether this is at home or on the go.
You might find that it helps you keep track of everything far more accurately and can help you with making sure that things are how they should be, as well as making them editable offline and available on most of your devices, whether that is on your computer, your phone, or your tablet.
#3 Get a good route planner
Getting a good route planner is essential to your business. It can help you safely navigate areas you don’t know, as well as look at the route ahead of you. This can be one of the newer apps that are available to download, which can help you dodge traffic, save battery, and gives you accurate ETAs, or just good old Google Maps, which is easy to use and you won’t get advertisements or pop-ups which might be distracting from the road.
A good route planner can help you make sure that you are getting to exactly where you need to go in the time, will help you avoid traffic, and will keep you on track to where you need to go. This can be a huge bonus to how you run your business, as it can help you work more effectively and plan better.