Trash Flow can track costs from container charges, work orders, or charges made from the Charge tab. Keep in mind that you must use bill codes in order to track container costs—the program cannot calculate costs if you manually enter the amounts without using bill codes. Trash Flow tracks two main kind of container costs: Tip cost (what it costs per ton for your business to dispose of customers’ garbage at a landfill or transfer station) and Truck cost (what it costs per mile to operate the truck doing the job).
Click and select Enable Customer Costs. Create at least one bill code for the tip cost by clicking . Enter a new Code, click ENTER and click , pick a Description, and set the Rate to what your business has to pay for disposal at the landfill. (If you pay different rates, either leave the code set at 0 so it can be changed when needed or create different bill codes for different rates.) Set the Type of Charge to variable and the Unit of Measure to TON (must be in all capital letters).
Next, use the above procedure to create at least one bill code for tracking truck costs. This should be a flat rate code; if you have to track costs for different trucks, you may want to leave the rate at 0 so it can be changed as needed.
When you go to complete a work order or make a container charge, you should have a section at the bottom of the window titled Costs. Enter the bill code you created for the Tip amount. When you enter in the Weight at the top of the window, Trash Flow will calculate the customer’s payment as usual, but also calculate your costs for disposal. Enter the bill code you created to track Truck costs; to the left of this enter the number of Miles your truck needed to drive to complete the job. Depending on how you set up the code, you may need to enter a rate in the /Mile box. (When a truck does jobs throughout the day it can be difficult to figure out the mileage for each individual job. You might ask your drivers to track mileage for individual jobs or divide the total mileage by the number of jobs at the end of the day.) There is one extra line where you can enter a bill code to track any Additional costs. When you save the charge to the customer’s account, you will see Costs listed in the Financial History. They don’t affect the balance and can be confusing in day to day operations; from a customer account window, you may wish to click and uncheck Costs so they will no longer display in history.
Once you’ve been tracking container costs for a while, you can run reports seeing how your costs stack up against your income. Click . Set Sorting to “Day” to begin with; you can try running the report with different sorting to see which format helps you the best. Set a start and end date, then click to preview and print.