How to calculate profit per truck, on one sheet of paper

Nadia knows what truck 118 grossed over the last four weeks. $24,200, nine loads delivered, and she will not be a dollar out.

Ask what the truck made and she goes quiet. The fuel is in the card statement. The driver pay is in the settlements. The note and the insurance leave the bank on the eighth of the month, whether 118 ran all four weeks or sat in the yard. None of that lives where the loads live, so the honest answer is an afternoon of spreadsheet work, per truck, every month. Most months nobody has the afternoon.

The arithmetic itself is not hard. It is three subtractions in a fixed order, and the order is the part carriers get wrong.

Start with a period, not a load

Profit per truck is a question about a stretch of time. It has to be. The truck's largest bills arrive monthly and have nothing to do with how many loads happened to run. A tractor note does not know it was a slow week.

So pick the window before anything else. A calendar month is the honest default. Four weeks works too, as long as the monthly bills get charged by the days inside it. Nadia is running 28 days.

One more decision before any subtraction. Revenue counts when the load delivered — not when it was invoiced, not when the broker finally paid. Count it on the money coming in and you are measuring the broker's payment terms, then calling the result a truck.

Step one: what the loads earned

Nine loads delivered on 118 in those 28 days: $24,200 in freight. The truck ran 11,000 miles doing it. Of those, 9,860 were loaded and 1,140 were deadhead, driven to reach the next shipper.

Write down both mile figures now. One of them flatters you and it is worth knowing which.

Step two: take off what those loads cost

Driver pay, fuel, lumpers, tolls, the factoring fee, and the running costs you carry by the mile — tires, oil, the maintenance you average out. All of it moves with the freight. Park the truck and almost all of it stops.

What is left is the contribution: what the loads left the company before the truck's own bills.

It is not profit. Calling it profit is the most common mistake on this page of arithmetic, and it flatters every truck you own by the same amount every time.

Step three: charge the truck its own bills, by the day

The note, the insurance, the plates and permits, the ELD subscription. Monthly figures, so they get charged to the truck by the days in the window — a flat thirtieth of the monthly figure for each day.

Truck 118 carries $3,420 a month, which is $114.00 a day. Twenty-eight days of it is $3,192. The truck could have been in the shop for eleven of those days and that figure would not move by a cent.

A truck that sat all week did not stop costing money. Any arithmetic that says otherwise is measuring the loads, not the truck.

The four weeks on one page

Line	Amount	Running
Revenue, 9 loads delivered	24,200.00	24,200.00
Driver pay, 11,000 miles at 58 cents	-6,380.00	17,820.00
Fuel, off the card statement	-6,558.40	11,261.60
Lumpers and tolls	-743.60	10,518.00
Factoring fee, 3 percent of the rate	-726.00	9,792.00
Running costs, 11,000 miles at 16 cents	-1,760.00	8,032.00
Contribution, before the truck's own bills		8,032.00
Tractor note, 1,890 a month, 28 of 30 days	-1,764.00	6,268.00
Insurance, 1,260 a month, 28 of 30 days	-1,176.00	5,092.00
Plates, permits and the ELD, 270 a month	-252.00	4,840.00
What truck 118 made in 28 days		4,840.00

That is the whole method. An afternoon per truck, once a month, and it holds up in front of a banker.

Doing it every month for every truck is the part nobody sustains, which is what fleet profitability software is for: every cost somebody enters lands on the load it belongs to, each truck's monthly figures are typed once and charged by the days in the window, and a week where a truck did not pay for itself arrives as an alert instead of a discovery in November. The miles come from the rate confirmation, or from your correction of it, or from a straight-line estimate between the two cities — and the figure always says which. Nothing is read off the truck.

The four places it goes wrong

1. Putting a fixed cost on a load

   Splitting the insurance across the loads that ran is the tempting shortcut, and it breaks the answer in both directions. A slow week divides the same bill over fewer loads and makes each one look expensive. A busy week makes the truck look cheap. Worse, a truck that ran nothing gets charged nothing, which is the exact opposite of what happened. Charge the truck, by the days.

2. Putting the repair bill in the margin

   Truck 118 had $4,900 of clutch work in the same 28 days. It does not come off the $4,840. The 16 cents a mile in the table already carries an average of that repair, so charging the actual bill on top counts maintenance twice: once as an average, once for real.

   Report it beside the margin instead. $4,900 over 11,000 miles is 44.5 cents a mile, against the 16 cents you are carrying, and against the rule of thumb the industry quotes at roughly 21.5 cents. Read that way it earns its place: this truck's repairs are running a fraction above what the truck itself earned per mile.

3. Dividing by loaded miles

   $24,200 over the 9,860 loaded miles is $2.45 a mile. Over all 11,000 miles it is $2.20. The second one is true. Those 1,140 deadhead miles burned real diesel and real hours, they appear on nobody's rate confirmation, and leaving them out of the denominator quietly adds twenty-five cents a mile to every lane you price.

4. Reading one window as a verdict

   A short window is fine to look at, as long as the fixed share goes in. What it produces is a question, not a judgement. One month under water on a truck that usually clears is a shop bill or a bad lane; three in a row is the truck.

The three numbers worth keeping

Revenue per mile, $2.20. Cost per mile — everything in the table, all 11,000 miles — $1.76. The gap is $0.44 a mile, and that gap is the only number on the sheet that compares honestly to any other truck in the yard.

Every carrier we sit down with has a cost per mile they can quote from memory. Almost none of them can say which truck it came from, or which month, or whether the tractor note was in it. The arithmetic above takes an afternoon and answers all three.

Every driver, dollar figure and company in this post is invented.