How to Know if Each Truck in Your Fleet Is Actually Making Money

Most transport and haulage businesses track profit. What almost none of them track is profit per truck. And that gap is where margin goes missing without anyone noticing.

If you run a fleet of five, ten, or twenty vehicles, your overall accounts might show a healthy percentage. But hidden inside that number is usually one or two trucks that are costing you far more than they are earning, a handful of jobs that look profitable on the surface but are not once you factor in every real cost, and a pricing model that has not been updated since fuel was at a different price.

The question "is my business profitable?" is worth asking. The better question is "which trucks are profitable, on which jobs, at what margin, and what does that mean for how I price and how I grow?"

This post explains how to get to that answer.

Why Your Standard Accounts Do Not Show You This

Your year-end accounts or monthly P&L will show you total revenue, total costs, and a profit figure. What they will not show you is how that profit breaks down across your fleet.

The reason is simple. Most accounting systems are not set up to allocate costs at the vehicle level. Fuel comes in as one bill. Driver wages go through payroll in a lump. Insurance covers the whole fleet on one policy. Maintenance bills land in a general cost code. None of it is automatically attached to a specific truck.

So you end up with an overall margin figure that tells you how the business is doing as a whole, but gives you no visibility on the individual units that make up that business.

This matters more than it might seem. A business running thirteen trucks might have three of those trucks dragging the margin down significantly, while the other ten perform well. The overall average looks acceptable. The underlying reality is that a quarter of your fleet is a problem you cannot see.

The Costs That Are Harder To Allocate Than You Think

When transport businesses try to build a per-truck P&L for the first time, they quickly discover that some costs are straightforward and some are genuinely complicated.

The straightforward ones are fuel, where you often have card data by vehicle, and direct maintenance, where invoices can usually be linked to a registration number. If you are invoicing by job and recording which truck completed it, revenue is also relatively clean.

The harder ones are driver wages, insurance, and overheads like yard rental, admin staff, and equipment.

Driver wages are complicated because drivers do not always stay in one truck. A driver might start a day in a two-car transporter and finish it in an artic. If you do not have a system that captures who drove what and when, you cannot allocate wages accurately. Dividing the total wage bill equally across all trucks gives you a number, but it is not a real number.

Insurance is similar. Your policy covers the whole fleet, but the premium is not evenly distributed across vehicles. An artic costs more to insure than a smaller vehicle. And if a driver has an incident, your entire policy can be affected.

Overheads like office costs and yard rent do not attach to individual trucks at all. The question is how to account for them when you are trying to understand what a truck needs to earn to cover its share of the business.

None of this means per-truck profitability is impossible to calculate. It means you need a method, and you need to be deliberate about what you are allocating, how, and why.

What A Usable Per-Truck P&L Actually Looks Like

The goal is not perfect accounting at the vehicle level. The goal is good enough information to make better decisions.

A practical approach is to split your costs into three categories.

The first category is costs you can directly allocate to a truck. Fuel, direct maintenance, tyres, specific repair bills, and revenue from jobs completed by that vehicle all sit here. This is your starting point and it gives you a gross contribution figure per truck.

The second category is costs you can allocate proportionally. Driver wages, if you can track which driver was in which truck most of the time, fall here. So does insurance, which you can distribute based on the number and type of vehicles rather than pretending it is equal. This is an estimate, but a reasoned one is far better than nothing.

The third category is overhead costs that you spread across the fleet as a whole. Yard rent, admin staff, utilities, and similar fixed costs are not driven by individual trucks. The most practical approach is to divide them by your fleet size, or by active days, to give each truck a share of what the business needs to cover just to exist.

Once you have all three categories working, you can look at each truck and see its contribution at the gross level, and then what it returns after bearing its share of the wider costs. The trucks that are consistently in the bottom half of that table are the ones worth examining first.

How This Changes The Decisions You Make

This kind of visibility shifts how you think about almost every operational question.

Subcontractors versus own fleet. When you use a subcontractor to cover jobs your own trucks cannot handle, you know you are paying a margin for the convenience. But without per-truck data, you do not know whether it would be more profitable to expand the fleet and bring that work in-house, or whether your own trucks are already underutilised and adding another vehicle would just add fixed cost without enough extra work to justify it. The numbers tell you which way to go.

Fleet investment decisions. When someone asks whether to buy a new truck, the question is not just whether there is enough work. It is whether the margin on that work, after the full cost of running the vehicle, justifies the investment. That answer requires knowing what your existing trucks actually cost to run and what they actually return.

Pricing. If your day rate on an artic has not been updated in two years, and fuel costs have moved, driver wages have gone up, and maintenance costs have increased, you may be pricing jobs that look profitable but are not. A per-truck model gives you a floor: this is what this vehicle needs to earn per day, per job, or per mile to cover its costs and contribute to profit. Everything you quote above that floor is real margin.

Customer concentration. When you can see revenue and contribution by vehicle, you can also start to see which customers are driving which trucks and at what margin. A business that has nearly half its revenue from one customer looks very different once you understand whether that customer's work is also your most or least profitable work.

A Note On Where To Start

If you have never built a per-truck P&L before, the temptation is to wait until you have perfect data. Do not.

Start with what you have. If you can pull revenue by job and you know which truck did each job, you have the income side. If you have fuel card data by vehicle registration, you have a direct cost. If you have maintenance invoices and most of them reference a truck, you have another piece.

The first version will be imperfect. Some costs will sit in an unallocated column because you genuinely cannot attach them to a specific vehicle yet. That is fine. An 80% accurate picture of where your margin is coming from is worth far more than no picture at all, and it tells you exactly where to focus to get to 90%.

Over time, as your systems improve, as you start capturing driver allocation by job, as you move to a digital job management system that records who drove what and when, the model gets sharper. But you do not need to wait for perfect before you start learning something useful.

What This Looks Like In Practice

Transport businesses that go through this exercise for the first time almost always find the same things.

One or two vehicles that are consistently in the bottom half of the table, either because they have higher maintenance costs, lower utilisation, or they tend to do lower-margin jobs.

A pricing model that has drifted from reality, often because it was built at a point in time and has not been updated to reflect changes in fuel, wages, or costs since then.

A subcontractor spend that, once you can see it clearly against own-fleet contribution, turns out to be diluting margin more than expected.

And often, a customer or job type that looks like good business from the outside but which, when you trace the costs properly, is among the lowest returning work in the fleet.

None of these are unusual. They are the normal result of running a growing business without the financial infrastructure to keep pace with the complexity. The businesses that find them early are the ones that can do something about them.

If you run a transport, logistics or haulage business and you want to understand where the profit is really coming from across your fleet, this is exactly the kind of work we do with our clients.

We build the per-vehicle management accounts, the pricing models, and the cash flow forecasts that give transport business owners a clear picture of where they are and what their options are. Without the cost of a full-time finance director.

You can find out more about how we work with transport and logistics businesses here, or book a free discovery call if you would rather just have a conversation first.

How We Work With Transport and Logistics Businesses

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