little info about dealing with brokers would be greatly appreciated

I went to office Depot and got the cheapest scanner/printer/copier they had, a brother, for $100. Works like a champ. Plenty of room for it in passenger side floorboard.

 

I have a HP Deskjet 2543, fits just about anywhere in my truck. Print, scan and copy, IIRC it was $69 from good ol' Wally world.

 

I'd like to add a question if anyone would care to respond. Do you guys keep your official records, (i.e.- broker contracts, rate confirmations, paid and unpaid invoices, BOL's) in hard copies, digital, or both ? I've changed my mind a couple times now. I was going all digital, scan everything, even reciepts, and store online. That was with the idea if there were other people we'd all have access. Now it's just me, haven't found the right secretary yet. Seems easier now to print out the digital stuff than scan and backup the hard copies. What do you guys do ?

 

I put everything in Dropbox (cloud). Really easy to transfer it from that or (you don't need Dropbox if you are not sharing with anyone) your computer to a zip drive if you want to. I see no sense in keeping stacks and file cabinets full of papers. Confirms might get printed or might not but always end up in the trash. After 8 days log sheets go in the trash also. POD's eventually get mailed to the office but are also stored electronically.

 

My truck "office" consists of:

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 smartphone (stylus comes in handy) with PDAnet hotspot app
Walmart HP laptop with Quicken Home & Business & TurboTax
Doxie Go scanner
A plastic portable file cabinet with various folders along with some envelopes, address labels, stamps, etc

I looked at portable printers, but because I can fill out and sign documents on my phone or laptop, I only need to print rate confirmations & invoices for the rare customer that requires everything by mail. So far I've paid maybe $10 to fax those documents to truck stops and use their fax machine as a printer.

I've got copies of broker contracts, bols, & rate confirmations on gmail (not the best security practice), as well as hard copies of the BOLs & digital copies of everything on my laptop & a removable harddrive I keep at home.

I'm thinking about purging the hard copies of logs/tollreceipts/fuel receipts/BOLs after 6 months and just going digital.

As far as paid/unpaid invoices -- Quicken Home & Business keeps track of that for me.

What are you using to prove Per Diem?

 

Logs are all stored in dropbox and flashed onto a zip drive quarterly. I have all of my logs from years past electronically. For tax purposes you have to keep copies for several years. For DOT audit they have to be kept (by the company I'm leased to but technically not me) but not as long as the IRS requires. For an inspection at a scale you are only required to keep 8 days previous printed off.

 

$280 for a portable printer is just too much. I have an $80 Brother All in One that I got for free with some promo deal. Has a flatbed and feeder scanner. Feeders are the best when scanning multiple pages. It's an old one that even has a bulky phone handset attached to the side. I'll use it till it puffs magic smoke. Then find the next best cheapest all in one piece of junk minus the fax.

I haven't gone full digital yet. Redundantly scanning the paperwork to have less physical paperwork is just another step I don't want to take on yet, simply because I'm not swimming in paperwork yet. With Landstar I just don't have much to deal with. All my paperwork so far fits into a 13 pocket accordion file.

When I do go digital, Western Digital makes those passport drives. I use those all the time already for media files. I'd also setup a home server with 2 or 3 drives in a Raid array. I wouldn't trust the cloud or some server I didn't have direct control of. I'd just setup my home network so I could access it from out on the road with a constant running cheap desktop PC on a UPC and a stable cheap internet connection. Plus that would only be used to backup files I would already have on a portable drive with me.

 

What websites do you use to get loads? I also just bought a new volvo truck and dry van and am waiting for a response from CH Robinson, but i don't know what other website is reliable and will allow me to find the most amount of loads. The responses to your questions have helped me out a lot and I had many of the same questions that you stated.

 

OOIDA's member's edge (powered by DAT), truckstop.com, getloaded, chrwtrucks, BNSF, Yusen, Matson, ATS, landstarbroker, freightfinder, just to name a few.