A business where one missed step can be catastrophic
Active Trailers buys salvage trailers at auction, rebuilds them in-house, then rents, leases, rent-to-owns or sells them. Many of its more than 350 trailers are out on the road at any given time, still registered in the company’s name.
Every single one needs a plate, verified insurance and a GPS tracker before it leaves the yard. Miss one, and the consequences are real. An unplated trailer means a trooper fine for the customer. An uninsured one is worse.
They wrecked the trailer, and they killed somebody, and they have no insurance. That trailer was in our name. It does happen, believe it or not.
Workarounds and a checklist for the checklist
Active Trailers’ industry software, ITrack by ISoft Data Systems, was built for salvage yards that sell parts, not for a fleet of whole trailers. It couldn’t even search by plate number or GPS tracker.
Getting it fixed wasn’t an option. Every change to ITrack cost $1,600, every time, and what came back was a workaround, not a fix.
So the team held the business together with five spreadsheets: inventory, plates, insurance, units being written up, and a checklist to make sure the other four got done.
Every time a unit got wrote up, we had to fill out all the spreadsheets, and then we had a checklist for the checklist.
One app, built around how they actually work
With GoodTaco, Active Trailers turned their spreadsheets into a custom app that tracks every trailer from the day it hits the yard to the day it’s sold. No migration, and nothing new for the yard to learn. It runs on the Google Sheet the team already knew.
- Rent-to-own agreement signed
- Plate on the unit
- GPS tracker installed
- Insurance policy on file Waiting on policy
- Plate
- TX 7HK 2291
- VIN
- Ends in 4821
- GPS tracker
- Tracker 118
- Out since
- Aug 12
- Stage changed Oct 20, 3:12 PM In rebuild → Ready for release
- Plate swapped Oct 18, 10:05 AM TX 4MN 1180 → TX 8KR 4127
- Tracker moved Oct 18, 9:51 AM From the 18′ dump trailer
- Insurance policy added Oct 17, 2:30 PM Policy on file, verified
Trailers no longer leave unplated or uninsured
The mistakes that used to slip through the cracks are gone. Asked if they still happen, her answer was two words:
“They don’t.”
Toll bills solved in seconds
A 49-cent toll can balloon to $150 by the time it reaches the right person. Toll notices usually come with nothing but a photo of a plate, and matching it to a trailer used to mean digging through spreadsheets.
Now I can go up here at the top of this app and type in the plate number, and it pops up.
Easy enough for an Excel pro, no coding required
Myka isn’t a developer. She’s an Excel power user, and she found general-purpose AI tools overwhelming. With GoodTaco, the first version of the app took minutes.
I feel like this is just pretty user-friendly for me.
When the business changes, the app changes with it, and Active Trailers doesn’t pay a vendor every time. Myka makes the updates herself. “I learned how to do it,” she says. Since that first app, Active Trailers has built more on GoodTaco, including its ACH scheduling.
A team that has her back
GoodTaco doesn’t hand over an app and disappear. The team backs up Active Trailers’ data every day, and schedules upgrades for weekends so the people working the yard never hit downtime. When Myka has a question, she gets a real person who knows her setup.
- Backed up every day Active Trailers’ data is backed up daily.
- Upgrades on weekends So the people working the yard never hit downtime.
- A real person Questions go to someone who knows her setup.
Y’all have been really good to work with.
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