Daycos News

Daycos will be closed on Friday, July 3rd in observance of Independence Day. Our normal business hours will resume on Monday, July 6th.

We thank you for your business and wish you all a safe and fun holiday!

One of the friendly, helpful voices you may encounter in our Customer Support Department belongs to our very own Sue Wegener.

Sue started with us in October 2007 as an External Customer Support Specialist, and her great attitude and outgoing personality has allowed her to become a very well-rounded asset here at Daycos. Although she spends the majority of her day answering all of our customer correspondence, Sue also helps out with DFAS short pays, works DPS and CWA follow-up, and also completes our customers’ Mid-South requests. She is also always willing to jump in and help out anyone who needs her assistance, and always has a great big smile on her face when she does it.

Sue lives about 30 miles south of Norfolk with her husband Ross and their cat, Queenie. When she is not busy working at Daycos, she is usually spending her time working in the lawn/garden, camping, watching Husker football, or just spending time with all of their friends and family. She is also involved with their local church, as well as with the Daycos Relay For Life team. And after almost 2 years here at Daycos, the favorite part of Sue’s job is ‘being able to help out and fix problems that any of our customers may have.’

As we move forward with DPS, we are working to get all remaining billing information into our internal billing system and AccuBill. Since there are no publicly published rates, we still need the rates that our customers have filed for the DPS program. There are a couple of options for us to obtain your filed rates. Our office can pull the information from DPS directly, but keep in mind that if we do this, we have no way to verify that they are correct. 

Another option is for our customers to provide their filed rates to us electronically. If you would like to provide us your filed rates to use for billing, we encourage you to do so.

For more information on the recommended format to provide your rates in, or if you have any questions, please contact us at support@daycos.com. 

The following article was taken from our Daycos 2nd Quarter 2009 Newsletter:
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As the volume of DPS invoices has increased over the first part of 2009, we had feared that the invoicing problems would become overwhelming with issues that would prevent TSPs from collecting payment. We are pleased to say that for the most part, that has not happened. Invoices are being paid, and money is flowing to the TSPs in a reasonable time frame. It is taking more work and manual intervention to get the invoices paid in DPS than it does in CWA, but that is to be expected in a new system.

The Numbers
Through the first of June, we have submitted 4,360 invoices to DPS, comprised of 3,325 Domestic and 1,035 International. We received payment on 2,660 invoices, of which approximately 10% ended up in Audit Exception status in PowerTrack, which is about the same percentage as the current program. As you can see in the chart below, the Audit Exception percentage has varied widely from month to month, with a high of 25% in February to a low of 7% in May. The average payment time for DPS invoices has continued to decline steadily despite the increase in volume, and it has been between 8 and 9 days for the past two months.

Existing Problems
In addition to working through the normal problems that come with any new system, there are a handful of systematic issues which have been plaguing the DPS invoicing process since its launch.

Alaska Linehaul: To date, we have billed approximately 25 Alaska linehaul invoices, and not one of them has rated correctly. We continue to work on testing potential fixes in the DPS Test System, but we have not successfully tested an Alaskan linehaul invoice.

Destination Linehaul Factor: On January 8th, 2009, we communicated to SDDC and JPMO-HHGS that there was a discrepancy between the destination point utilized by DPS to calculate the destination factor portion of linehaul, and the one indicated by the AMSA 400NG tariff. Basically, DPS was using the SIT location if a shipment went into SIT, and the AMSA instructions indicated it should be based on Block 18 of the GBL. Six months later, this issue is still not resolved, and is the root cause for a large percentage of our Audit Exceptions.

Transmission Errors: One of the real problems we had in the early days of CWA was transmission errors passing files back and forth between CWA and PowerTrack. While we have not seen the same volume of problems in DPS, there are still significant issues, and the problems seem to be increasing. We currently have 131 help desk tickets opened on invoice transmission problems with DPS.

Future Potential Problem
While we have enough to worry about with our current issues, we also continue to fear what problems might arise in the future with GSA Notices of Overcharge on DPS shipments. While we have been able to use “workarounds” to keep invoices moving and payments being made, we do not know how GSA will view these workarounds. We are trying to document as well as we can, but we suspect that we will be defending these invoices a couple of years down the road from a GSA audit.

The Daycos 2nd Quarter Newsletter is complete, and can be viewed here. A few of the topics include:

DPS Invoicing Shows Improvement
Information on AMSA Rating Software
Current Program Billing Changes
2009 Daycos Relay For Life Team
DPS Billing Tips

We invite you to view the entire newsletter and share it with all of your staff!

A big Congratulations is extended to Amy & Doug Clausen, as they have a new little addition to their family! Miles Dean Clausen was born early this morning, June 10th, here in Norfolk. He weighed 7 lbs, 9 oz.

Amy is the Executive Administrative Assistant here at Daycos. She and her husband Doug, along with Maisey (8) and Parker (4), anxiously welcome Miles into their family.

Hard at work, quickly billing invoices each and every day, we would like to take the time to introduce you to Audrey Obermire.

Audrey started with us here at Daycos in September 2005 as a biller in our Production Department. Today she is cross-trained to bill any of our international, domestic, and DPS shipments that are sent into the office each day. She is also willing to help out with accomplishing/rating paper invoices that need to be sent out the door every afternoon.

Audrey lives here in Norfolk with her husband Tracy, along with their 3 children (twin girls April & Sarah, 21, and Nick, 17). In her spare time she enjoys camping, traveling, cooking/baking, and overall just spending time with all of her family. After working here for almost 4 years already, Audrey said the favorite part about her job here at the company is "the flexible hours so that I can take the time I need so spend time with my family, as well as watch all of my kids' activities."

The price of fuel was $2.35 per gallon as reported on Monday, June 1, 2009 making the upcoming FSC rates for the period 6/15/09 through 7/14/09 as follows:

GBL Domestic HHG / International HHG & UB - 0%
GSA Domestic HHG - $0.00
GSA International HHG and BAG - $0.00

NOTE - You are reading correct above, there is NO fuel surcharge applicable for the specified period. The baseline rate that is used to calculate the fuel surcharge adjustment is $2.50. With the reported cost of fuel now below that baseline amount, a fuel adjustment does not apply.

After 35 years, James Fitzgerald, Director, Audit Division, General Services Administration, has chosen today as his last day. His recent decision to retire and his final date was kept quiet per his request until yesterday afternoon, when he advised his staff and demanded "no fan-fare!"

We have had the privilege of working with Jim on many issues over the years, and we have always found him to be fair and honest. Quite often we had to agree to disagree, however we were always able to do it in a respectful manner.

Jim's retirement takes from us a lot of knowledge of this industry. He will certainly be missed at GSA, and his retirement will leave a void in our industry. We wish him nothing but the best in his retirement, as he looks forward to spending much more time with his five grandchildren. Our thanks to Jim for all he has done for Daycos and the entire transportation industry.

Over the course of the last week, there has been a growing number of I-22 International invoices that have gone into Audit Exception in PowerTrack (PT) due to CE07 rating errors in CWA. CE07 rating errors mean that the CWA rating engine was unable to identify the rate area to correctly rate the invoice. This is not a new error, but is appearing on a much larger scale that usual.

We have opened a help ticket with the CWA Help desk who is aware of the issue and working to resolve the rating problems as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we will continue to rebill all affected invoices for our billing customers that we handle the PT/CWA follow-up for, using the MISC item code to get the charges paid as timely as possible.