Common Challenges in Toll Management for Fleet Operations

Running a trucking company comes with many challenges, and a lot of them revolve around tolling. With more than 50 tolling authorities covering over 6,000 miles in the U.S., toll management is one of the biggest headaches facing interstate fleets today.

Cashless systems throughout the U.S. have promised to simplify tolling processes, but many fleets saw the opposite. The complexity of toll management — including frustrations with tolling interoperability, license misreads and unnecessary payments — continues to plague those fleets that have opted to manage tolling on their own.

Each of these headaches will affect your business’ efficiency in specific ways, including wasted time and revenue loss. Today, it is more important than ever to have a streamlined toll management process in place to keep your business thriving.

1. Handling Too Much Paperwork

One of the biggest challenges for fleet managers is handling paperwork. Fleets often deal with multiple tolling agencies individually. Multiple tolling agencies mean multiple invoices, violations to manage and overwhelming amounts of paperwork that will take you and your staff away from the primary mission of the fleet — supporting the company’s bottom line. When you have accounts with multiple tolling authorities, you can spend hours or even days every month shuffling invoices and submitting payments through multiple interfaces.

Similarly, paperwork can become a larger issue when you have time-intensive tasks to complete. Meeting or staying ahead of deadlines is crucial for maintaining a good reputation and avoiding late fees or fines. Navigating multiple systems or physical paper can waste valuable time and impact several processes in the long term, as well as your bottom line.

By using a toll management provider, you save time and expenses by reducing the administrative work of managing multiple tolling accounts. By consolidating all of them into a single bill, you’ll have a more meaningful picture of toll usage across the entire fleet.

Toll management providers such as Bestpass provide clients with consolidated billing, gathering all tolling data on a single, reconciled statement. This solution cuts down on paperwork burden while flagging possible violations that you can better monitor and investigate to avoid paying for an inaccurate toll.

2. Juggling Too Many Transponders

Having a large number and assortment of individual tolling accounts can be overwhelming and increase administrative burdens. Whether your fleet is small or large, managing tolls independently often means managing a variety of transponders. 

Keeping track of transponder data can be as confusing and overwhelming as handling the paperwork from the tolling authorities. If you do it yourself, you’ll need to stay on top of toll usage and whether a truck has the correct transponders for its given route. This issue is especially frustrating when determining misreads and violations that go along with the transponder. 

When you work with a leading toll management provider such as Bestpass, you’ll have access to on-demand reporting, which permits you to filter through toll data by transponder, truck, state, day and month. With just a few clicks, you can assign, activate and deactivate transponders as your business needs change.

3. Navigating Customer Service

Dealing with a tolling authority’s customer service portal can be frustrating and challenging. Bestpass simplifies this complexity with one consolidated dashboard. Some tolling authorities only have automated customer service, meaning you can only reconcile mistakes at a local office. This process can be highly inconvenient for a fleet operation headquartered in another state — the result is losing time and potentially paying for an unnecessary toll or violation. 

A toll management provider allows you to bypass this headache by relying on the provider’s expertise and connections with the individual tolling authorities. Bestpass was created by the Trucking Association of New York and understands the hardships and challenges fleets experience, particularly regarding toll management. The company’s industry knowledge allows it to represent the fleet’s account with the agencies, making future issues easier and quicker to resolve without fleet personnel enduring the headache of trying to manage it on their own.

4. Missing out on Discounts

By managing their tolls independently, small and even midsize trucking companies can miss out on volume toll discounts that megafleets with thousands of vehicles receive. Greater cost savings is one of the clear advantages of using a tolling management provider. In addition to passing on transponder discounts, many tolling authorities will offer commercial fleets volume discounts based on frequency of travel or volume of toll transactions. With rising toll prices across the U.S., discounts can be big money savers in the long term. 

Bestpass gives small and midsize fleets access to the highest possible volume discounts, which many fleets may not qualify for on their own. These discounts, which are available in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado and other jurisdictions, can top 20%. While saving money on tolls directly is an attractive goal for a fleet's bottom line, improving overall efficiency should be a fleet manager’s paramount aim when managing toll needs. Resolving these challenges head-on with a tolling management provider is often the quickest route to success.

5. Lacking Visibility

Having visibility over tolls and payments empowers fleet managers to effectively control and monitor expenses. Mobile devices and other advanced technologies allow fleet managers to connect to their vehicles in real-time, offering comprehensive visibility about operations. However, this connectivity doesn't always address crucial data points like tolls, especially when a fleet utilizes multiple systems.

Bestpass offers this visibility for every fleet. Fleets can access any data associated with their toll costs at any time and in any location. You will also receive a monthly statement so you can always see where your tolls are coming from. This enhanced visibility is the missing piece for many managers and operators, and you can leverage this information to make real-time decisions that drive growth.

6. Hampered Decision-Making

Multiple record systems can be challenging to navigate at any time, but when it comes to quick decisions, the process becomes especially damaging. Finding solutions and creating worthwhile objectives calls for timely data access. Leveraging multiple systems prompts you to spend unnecessary time routing through papers or reorganizing files when you could otherwise support your business with precise decision-making.

Adopting a flexible decision is crucial for ensuring you can access data and make decisions quickly. Bestpass provides a flexible solution. With Bestpass, you can find coast-to-coast coverage in one invoice and on one device. Additionally, our customer service is always ready to help if you ever need assistance. 

7. Overcoming Human Error

A challenge in nearly any industry is human error. However, for fleets, human error can bring costly results. Managing the tolling process involves a careful eye and a deep understanding of how toll systems work. Simple mistakes like misclassification can lead to costly errors.

Improving visibility and creating standardized processes is an excellent way to reduce these mistakes and ensure you have a way to rectify them quickly. Reducing errors is one of the best reasons to switch to a toll management solution. Bestpass offers an Automated Misread Identification Service, which identifies toll misreads and finds instances of maxed tolls and transponder activity to save you time and money.

Curing Your Headaches With Bestpass 

Addressing tolling challenges requires a solution that eases administrative burdens and saves time and money. Bestpass delivers a combination of four specific values that, taken together, will be your tolling headache cure:

• Accuracy: Improve results with daily transaction audits, misread identification and correction and violation mitigation and processing.
• Expertise: Meet your goals with help from a team of toll experts for all toll-industry questions, valuable tools to empower toll data analysis and industry notifications on updates that will impact your business.
• Consolidation: Streamline your tolling through simplified reporting with one account. You'll get a single monthly statement to facilitate easier toll transaction reconciliation and comprehensive toll data in one easy-to-access location.
• Savings: Improved back-office efficiency gets you back to your core business while introducing cost savings from the highest possible discounts at all tolling facilities. You also reduce the amount of money tied up in multiple toll deposits and bonds.

While fleets of any size can manage tolls on their own, they’ll likely face serious headache-inducing inefficiencies that will cost precious administrative time and money. Turning to a tolling management provider such as Bestpass eliminates the headaches of inefficiency and delivers the benefits of streamlined, robust handling of the entire fleet’s tolling needs. Bestpass can help you simplify fleet management processes. Request a demo of Bestpass's comprehensive solution today.