Disclaimer - This is not financial advice, consult with a qualified tax accountant to fully understand how this rule will impact your business.

What is the Section 179 Deduction?

Section 179 tax deduction of the IRS Tax Code applies to tax deductions for purchases of certain qualified equipment. In previous years, when a business bought certain equipment, as it depreciated, it was written off over a long period of time. In other words, if your company purchased a  $100,000 machine, it would get written off over the next five years. In 2020, the Section 179 deduction, allows businesses to write off the full purchase price for the current tax year.

This means that small and medium-sized U.S. companies can deduct the full price of qualified equipment purchases (up to $1,040,000). In 2020, the deduction applies to both new and used qualified equipment.

Who Qualifies for Section 179?

Section 179 is a government incentive that originally focused on small businesses to medium sized U.S. based companies, and has been included in many of the recent Stimulus Acts and Congressional Tax Bills. It has recently expanded to include all businesses that purchase, finance, and/or lease new or used business equipment. Tax year 2020 qualifies for the Section 179 Deduction. 

How does Telematics Equipment Qualify?

In order for the equipment, vehicle(s), and/or software to qualify, they must be used for business purposes more than 50% of the time.This deduction incentive allows companies to experiment with utilizing technologies, like telematics, that improves the efficiency and functions of the business. Investing in the latest technologies can allow your business to grow in efficiency and perform at maximum productivity. 

Section 179 is designed to make purchasing/leasing that equipment during this calendar year financially attractive by allowing businesses to write off the entire purchase price.  Businesses have used Section 179 to purchase equipment right now, instead of waiting to make the investment. 

 

When speaking with a client about their recent vehicle purchase, the owner smiled and said, "I want to show you something". He pulled out a spread sheet containing the cost centers for all of their pickup trucks, vans, rack trucks and dump trucks.

Your new hires are helping you expand, but some are bringing lousy driving habits you don't want along with them, and given your busy schedule, you won't have time to train them. Or do you?

One thing that is commonly asked for new users signing up for GPS fleet management is: will this save money on my insurance? And the answer is, 'it depends'.

Like most things, if the system is not monitored and the information it provides is not acted upon then GPS won't be nearly as effective as it has the potential to be.

The first thing our customer success team reviews with new clients is their vehicle use policy. Most don't have anything concrete and it usually consists of some unwritten rules that are told to drivers.

Insurance companies like to see things written down, something that can be clearly communicated with drivers, managers and staff. We tend to agree and provide a boilerplate template for a vehicle use policy and customize it to our client's own policies they want to enforce.

In the past few years, there has been a push to start up cashless tolling in full effect; especially after other states like Massachusetts have become completely toll-booth free. New York is following suit with the NY Thruway Authority announcing that it will be switching to cashless tolling by the end of 2020.

 

You aren't alone in dealing with apathetic, unhelpful and plain rude customer service. Sadly, this has become the accepted norm, even for products and services we champion and invest heavily in. If you think this is ridiculous and makes no sense, we agree.

Driver safety dash cam

Carmalink is the leader in creating safer drivers with timely, trainable, accurate safety reports. Safety managers are using these reports during driver meetings to highlight the skills drivers need to focus on improving.

Feedback from the last Carmalink user survey indicated that safety was the top priority for most fleet owners. We know it can be hard to look at a list of "Safety Alerts" and make decisions about what to do with drivers continually receiving these alerts. With the addition of the Garmin Fleet 790 tablet, safety managers will see 1080p HD footage of each safety incident.

- No more guessing what happened
- Use the footage to see who needs training
- A clear picture of the required steps to correct the problem

Carmalink prioritizes your fleet's safety and we incorporate new technology such as video capture and artificial intelligence to detect more complex safety issues like distracted driving, cell phone usage, tailgating, and more.

 

 

Thank you to everyone for coming out and making this year's Touch a Truck event put on by the Trucking Association of NY a success. And a special thank you to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum in Glenville for hosting us at your facility.

After listening to feedback, it became clear that a lot of our customers have mixed use fleets, and not all of them need ELD. However, all trucks needed connected dash cams and navigation.

This caused an issue between using ELDs for all trucks and creating issues for the back office staff dealing with unclaimed records from non-ELD drivers or only having part of their fleet covered with nav and cameras.

We wanted to create a new plan that fits between the Basic and Pro that brings the advantages of running an ELD tablet in a truck without the ELD headaches.