Day 1: You leave New York City at 6 a.m. on Monday, February 10th.
You use the Holland Tunnel to travel to the New Jersey Turnpike, Route 95. The fee is $3.50 for the two-mile tunnel. Then, you pay a $5.00 toll to travel on the turnpike and continue to Trenton, New Jersey, where you have lunch for $5.50 with the tip. From Trenton, you go down the turnpike to Delaware where you have plates. Your odometer says 54,121 as you leave NJ. You travel 16 miles through Delaware on I-95 which is not a toll road. At the Maryland state line you pay a $25.00 entry fee. You continue on the JFK Memorial Highway through Maryland, taking the ring road I-695 around Baltimore. Leaving I-695, you take State Highway 3 and U.S. Highway 301 avoiding Washington, DC, to a motel just prior to the Virginia state line. The motel costs $19.50 for the night. Dinner amounts to $6.25 with the tip. Just after dinner, you call your dispatcher on your company's 800 number. (You are supposed to call in every night between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m.) You covered 194 miles today.
Day 2: Tuesday, at 4:30 a.m., you have breakfast for $4.50 and cross the Virginia line with your mileage at 54,199. You have a prorate plate for Virginia. You take U.S. 301 and State Route 207 44 miles to I-95. Since the weather is turning bad, you choose an interstate because that will be the first highway to be plowed in case of snow. After another 74 miles in VA on I-95, you cross into North Carolina, where you also have a prorate plate. Later, you stop for lunch and fuel at a truck stop near Fayetteville. Lunch is $5.90 with the tip. You purchase 185 gallons of fuel at the Dean Boys for $215.00. Leaving Fayetteville at 1:30 p.m., you head south, continuing along I-95. The weather gets worse. When you stop at the South Carolina border to buy a 72-hour permit, it starts to snow. Your odometer says 54,501. The permit costs $27.00. Travel is slow, and at 5:30, after traveling only 20 miles in South Carolina, you stop at a motel for $22.00. You call in and let your dispatcher know where you are, and why. Dinner costs $6.75. You pay cash because this isn't a scheduled stop and the small town restaurant doesn't take any credit cards. After dinner, you organize your receipts for the last two days. You've been putting them all in one envelope, and you keep the envelope in your door pocket. You double check that they are all recorded on your reports, and can't find a receipt for the breakfast you had today. You check your wallet, and it's there. Then, you put the whole kit and caboodle into a trip envelope. You covered 327 miles today.
Day 3: Wednesday. You have breakfast at 5:00 a.m., at the same little cafe. You pay $4.50 in cash. The snow plows have been through, but the roads are icy and the going is slow. You run for 3 hours, then stop for lunch and fuel at one of your regular fuel stops at the intersection of I-95 and I-26. You take in 80 gallons of fuel at $95.00. Lunch is $5.25. You place a call to the plant in Charleston for $.95 to let them know you'll be in before noon. No one answers. They have a holiday message tape on that tells you the plant will open at 7 a.m. on Thursday. You forgot that February 12th was a holiday. Your tractor's turn and stop signals have been shorting out, so you decide to use the day to get them repaired. You make some calls for $2.35 and find out that the only truck shop open today is Big E Repair Shop in Charleston, so you decide to lay over there. Arriving there an hour and a half later, you drop your trailer at a motel and run the tractor over to it. You call your office and they approve the repairs. But your dispatcher isn't very happy about the delay. Truck repairs cost $69.00, Invoice #46832. You pay with Mastercard. While waiting for repairs, you go into a cafe and have a soft drink and Danish for $1.75. You return to the motel and check in for $26.00. Dinner, with tip, costs $7.45. You total up your day's receipts and tuck them into an envelope. You covered 135 miles today.
Day 4: In the morning, you have breakfast at your motel for $5.50 and hookup to your trailer. Then you make your delivery. The return trip begins here. You call in to see if your dispatcher has a return haul lined up for you. He does. You are to pick up a load of 55 gallon drums of hydrogen peroxide U.S.P. from a chemical manufacturing company in Charleston and deliver it to a drug manufacturer in Philadelphia, PA. You attend the loading of your trailer, then check to see that the shipping papers are properly prepared and head off.
Fill in the Trip Expense Report for 2/10, 2/11, and 2/12. Then total everything up. Your total for everything except fuel should come to $248.15 If it doesn't, double check your work. You should find an error somewhere.
(Completing Daily Cost Reports)
You have just completed an exercise designed to teach you how to record road expenses on a trip-by-trip basis. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, however, some companies want you to record your expenses and mail them in daily. Most likely, company policy would have you send in your expense report and all receipts no later than 48 hours after leaving the terminal and daily from then on. In such a case, you could hold the expense report and receipts for Day 1 and mail it in with the things for Day 2, or you could mail them in daily anyway. It just depends on company policy.
So in a moment, we'll be teaching you how to record expenses on a daily basis when a company pays expenses. But first, we need to explain a few things about how "company pays all" works. There are two ways things can be handled when a company pays a driver's road expenses. So, before we teach you how to complete a Daily Cost Report, we'll explain these two systems.
Per Diem System:
One way of handling a driver's road expenses is to give a driver a per diem. A driver on a per diem, is given a set amount per day which is supposed to pay any personal road expenses. Your main personal road expenses will of course be food and motels. But if you can save money by eating and sleeping in a sleeper berth, you might be able to save enough money on food and lodging to pay for an occasional night out or laundry expense. But don't get your hopes up. Per diems are usually quite small. If you do use a motel and eat three meals a day in a cafe, you'll be lucky if you don't have to dip into your own pocket before lunch each day.
We can't stress this point enough. If you plan to live high on the hog, you'd better like eating your paycheck as you go, because you won't be taking much home at the end of each trip.
The per diem does not have anything to do with expenses that are related to the operation of the truck. Nor does it have anything to do with miscellaneous hauling expenses (like permits and tolls). The per diem is to cover driver-related expenses only (mostly food and lodging). Truck- related expenses and miscellaneous hauling expenses are handled the way they are in the reimbursement system. (We'll be discussing that system in a moment.)
